Beyond the BOM: Customer Portal & PCB Data Pack Quoting

Quote the BOM. For years, that's where CalcuQuote started and stopped. But a real chunk of any quote's cost lives in the fab and labor decisions driven by prints, schematics, Gerbers, stackups, and placement files. Beyond the BOM is the answer: a Customer Portal partnership with bee produced that lets your customer drop a full data pack in one click, reads Gerber and placement files automatically, and lays the foundation for richer PCB quoting inside CalcuQuote.

Headshot Brant Littrell_250x250px
Brant Littrell
Account Manager, CalcuQuote

Brent works directly with customers on quoting workflows, onboarding, and account success — bringing a practical view of how EMS teams manage RFQs day to day.

Headshot Taylor Baker_250x250px
Taylor Baker
Customer Support Specialist, CalcuQuote

Taylor works hands-on with customers to resolve quoting issues and platform questions — a front-line view of where EMS users hit friction across BOMs, RFQs, and data.

CalcuQuote_Partner Photo_Wilfried Lepuschitz_250x250px_2026
Wilfried Lepuschitz
CEO & Co-Founder, bee produced

Wilfried leads the Vienna team behind bee produced's Customer Portal and Gerber Viewer — the tech now powering the new PCB data pack integration with CalcuQuote.

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Key Takeaways

Think outside the BOM

RFQs are more than a BOM. Fab and labor decisions live in the rest of the data pack.

  • Prints, schematics, Gerbers, stackups, and placement files all carry real cost signal
  • Fab and labor signal especially gets lost when those files sit outside the quoting workflow
  • Beyond the BOM brings every data source into the same workflow

 

One drop, automatic data extraction

With the bee produced Customer Portal, a single zipped data pack does the work.

  • Your customer or your sales team drops in a zipped data pack
  • The system reads the BOM, prints, and pick-and-place files automatically
  • No manual sorting, no email ping-pong, no spreadsheets-by-attachment

A real customer-facing portal

Brand it as your own and stand the portal up in about half an hour.

  • Add your logo and colours and let customers upload RFQs, track progress, and chat with your team in one place
  • Use it externally as a customer-facing tool, internally for your sales team, or both
  • Roughly 30 minutes to set up

Built for the commercial and shop-floor handshake

Commercial quotes material confidently. Engineers read stackups. Both work from the same source of truth.

  • Commercial team quotes material with the data they need
  • Engineers read stackups in the same system
  • A chat thread on the side means questions about fab, finish, and stackup actually get answered

Granular labor signal from PCB data

Reading top and bottom placement separately changes the labor maths.

  • 50 components all on one side is a very different labor reality from 25 on each side
  • That granularity flows into feeder setup, cycle times, and line allocation decisions
  • Better placement data upstream means a more accurate quote downstream

Phase one today, deeper PCB quoting next

The roadmap: partner-powered Customer Portal now, embedded Gerber reader next.

  • Start with the partner-powered Customer Portal
  • Phase in a fully embedded Gerber reader inside CalcuQuote
  • bee produced supports 128 layers today
  • For PortCQ users, this replaces what you have today, and the integration plays nicely with Own Your Instance classification logic