How fabricators are quoting portal frames in under four minutes (with the GA drawing)

Walk into a small steel-fabrication office on a Tuesday afternoon and ask the estimator how long their last portal-frame quote took. The honest answer is somewhere between two hours and two days. The numbers came from a master spreadsheet that someone — possibly the boss, possibly an estimator who left in 2019 — built years ago. The GA drawing came from somewhere else entirely: a junior detailer marking up a previous job, or it didn't exist at all because drawings at quote stage are "expensive."

That workflow used to be the only option. It is not the only option any more.

The four-minute claim, in actual minutes

When we say a portal frame can be quoted in under four minutes, we mean the genuinely measurable bit: from opening a fresh estimate to having a priced PDF with a full GA drawing on it ready to send. The first time you do it — setting up your firm, your rates, your steel sections — will take longer. About twenty minutes. After that, the speed kicks in because the rates are already in.

The four minutes break down roughly like this:

• 0:00 — 0:20 · Project type and address. Supply & install, supply only, or sub-contract handover. Type the site postcode and the customer name.
• 0:20 — 1:30 · Geometry. Span, length, eaves, pitch. Bay spacing or a frame count. The price ticker starts moving the second you finish a field.
• 1:30 — 2:30 · Openings. Roller doors, personnel doors, glazing — pull from your saved openings library or override on the fly.
• 2:30 — 3:30 · Specification check. Cladding profile, primary steel grade, secondary, concrete grade. All inherited from your rate library, all editable per quote.
• 3:30 — 4:00 · Generate the PDF. The GA drawing renders, the priced spec table compiles, the preliminary steel order gets attached. Hit send.

It is fast because the work that used to happen at quote stage — pricing every section in a spreadsheet, drawing the GA by hand — happened once when you set the rate library up. From then on, the engine reuses your numbers and your geometry rules.

Why the GA drawing on the quote matters more than people think

A lot of fabrication shops still send out quotes that are pure text: a spec table, a price, a payment-terms paragraph. The buyer looks at two or three of these from competing fabricators and tries to compare them. They cannot, because the specs are inconsistent and there is no visual.

Now imagine your quote includes a one-page general arrangement drawing — plan view of the bays, four wall elevations with the openings drawn in, a spec table beside it. Same price as the competitor. Different feeling entirely. The buyer can see what they are getting. They can show it to their client. They can ask questions about it. You move from "another quote" to "this firm clearly knows what they're doing."

That is what closes work. Not a lower price. A clearer document.

What the GA actually shows at quote stage

A common worry is that producing a GA drawing at quote stage is the same as producing a workshop drawing. It isn't, and it shouldn't be. The quote-stage GA is indicative — clearly labelled as such — and exists to show shape, scale and openings, not connection detail.

What it includes:

• Plan view showing span × length, bay layout, ridge line, north arrow
• Four wall elevations (long sides and gables) showing height, openings, cladding sweep
• A clearly-marked "INDICATIVE ONLY" badge so nobody confuses it for issued-for-construction
• A spec table with the priced primary steel, secondary, cladding, concrete and openings
• Span, length, eaves height, pitch, bay count, frame count, floor area, ridge height — spelled out so the buyer can sense-check it against their own brief

What it does not include: connection design, exact section sizes for rafters, baseplate detail, holding-down bolt schedules. None of that should be on a quote-stage drawing because none of it is contractually fixed yet.

Where the time savings actually go

The interesting question is what the estimator does with the three-and-a-half hours per quote that this saves. We have heard three consistent answers from early users:

1. They quote more jobs. Where a small firm used to turn around six quotes a week, they now turn around twenty. Win rate stays the same, so revenue grows roughly with quote volume.

2. They go after work they would have walked away from. A 100-tonne portal frame from an unknown contact who needs a quote by Thursday used to be a "no, sorry, fully booked" call. Now it's a ten-minute job, so the answer is yes.

3. They send chase emails and follow up. The thing every estimator says they should do but never has time for. Now they do.

The honest catch

Software like this only works if your rate library is realistic. Garbage in, garbage out — if your steel rate is two years out of date, the quote will be wrong fast. The first 20-minute setup is not optional. Done properly though, you only do it once.

The other catch is that fast quotes are not the same as good quotes. A four-minute quote on a job you don't understand is still a bad quote. The point of speed is to free up time for thinking about the ones that matter, not to mechanise the whole pipeline.

Try it on a real job

The fastest way to see whether this fits your shop is to take a portal frame you quoted last month and re-quote it inside SteelEstim8. Compare the price you sent versus the price the engine produces, and see whether the GA drawing the engine generates makes sense for the building you remember.

We have a half-price intro running until 31 July 2026 — £105 per month for the first three months on a 12-month contract. Sign up here, or read the full step-by-step first.