Should a manufacturer publish prices or lead times?

The convention in job-shop manufacturing is to publish nothing and to quote everything, and the reasoning behind it is sound as far as it goes: every job is different, a published price invites comparison on the wrong basis, and a stated lead time becomes a commitment the shop may not be able to meet in a busy month. All of that is true and all of it concerns what happens after a buyer contacts you.

What has changed is what happens before. Industrial buyers now complete a large part of their evaluation independently, assembling a shortlist from what they can find, and a substantial share of them eliminate suppliers who publish no pricing information at all — not because the price was too high, but because there was nothing to evaluate and another supplier gave them something. That elimination happens without an enquiry, without a conversation and without any record reaching the shop. The cost of publishing nothing is therefore invisible in exactly the way the cost of publishing something is visible.

The framing that resolves this is that publication is not binary. What loses negotiating room is a firm price for a specific job. What survives a shortlist is a great deal less than that: the size envelope and tolerances you work to, the materials and processes you run, a minimum order value, an indicative range for a common part class, and a typical quote turnaround. None of those price a specific job. All of them let a buyer establish that you are a plausible supplier, which is the only decision being made at that stage.

The minimum order value is worth singling out because it does more work than anything else on that list, and it works in both directions. Published, it removes enquiries below your economic floor before they consume estimator time, and it signals seriousness to buyers above it. Unpublished, the shop receives those enquiries anyway, quotes some of them out of politeness, and loses the estimator hours regardless. This is the rare disclosure that reduces incoming work and improves the shop's economics at the same time.

Lead time carries a real risk and it is manageable by how it is expressed. A published typical turnaround for quoting — as distinct from for production — is a commitment about your own process rather than about the shop floor, and it is the one buyers use most when shortlisting. Production lead times are better expressed as a current range with a stated observation date than as a promise, which keeps the information useful without converting it into a guarantee that a busy month will break.

The asymmetry is what should decide it. Publishing costs a measurable amount of negotiating room on jobs you quote. Publishing nothing costs an unmeasurable number of jobs you never hear about. When one cost is visible and the other is not, the reliable error is to keep paying the invisible one — and the convention that says otherwise was formed when buyers had to call you to find anything out.