A New Approach to the RFQ process in Aerospace and Defence
There is a question that sits at the heart of every sourcing decision in aerospace and defence, and the industry has never had a reliable way to answer it cleanly: what should this part actually cost to make?
Not what a supplier quoted. Not what it cost last time. What it should cost — given the geometry, the material, the process it requires, and the capacity available in the market right now.
For decades, the answer has lived inside the heads of experienced cost engineers. People who can look at a drawing, understand the manufacturing intent, map a process route, and build up a should-cost from first principles. They are rare, expensive, and impossible to scale.
LevelPlane is the answer.
The platform is an orchestrated system of AI agents, each with a specific role. One reads the drawing — geometry, tolerances, material callouts, title block notes and writes it down once so nothing downstream has to read it again. Another works out how the part is actually made: the process route, the operations, the machine that runs each one, with the rule that chose it made visible so it can be challenged. A third owns the should-cost end to end — material, conversion, setup, logistics, overhead and margin — and produces not a figure but a model. Something you can open, interrogate and negotiate with.
What makes this different from every other AI tool promising to fix procurement is what it does not do. It does not apply machine learning to historical spend data. It does not summarise documents or automate emails. It reasons — through CAD geometry, material science and global machine capacity — the same way a senior cost engineer reasons, but in hours rather than weeks.
For OEM procurement teams, the implication is significant. Should-cost benchmarks generated at the point of RFQ mean overpricing is caught before a purchase order is approved, not discovered in a post-award audit. For suppliers, the quoting cycle — historically one of the most labour-intensive parts of winning new business — compresses from days to under an hour, with risks flagged before commitment.
LevelPlane calls it a new operating system for sourcing. It is a reasonable claim. The decision that once required a specialist, a spreadsheet and several weeks now takes an hour.
Come and see LevelPlane live at Stand S150K, Advanced Engineering 2026, NEC Birmingham | 4–5 November 2026.
Bring a drawing – we’ll price it up on the spot.
To learn more please visit: www.levelplane.com
