Quoting Software
The quote that takes three days to leave, depends on one person, and arrives after your competitor. Configure, price, quote: in minutes, with your own cost logic inside.
Book your Diagnostic ↗The order goes to whoever answered first, not to whoever was best.
Quoting software, known in English as CPQ, means a system that holds your configuration rules and your cost logic: the customer or the sales rep configures the product, the system prices it with the real numbers, applies the approval thresholds, and issues a quote in minutes that used to take days.
In an industrial company the quote is usually the bottleneck nobody has named. The price depends on material, dimension, quantity, finish, tooling and freight, that logic lives in one engineer's spreadsheet, and every request queues behind that person's week. Meanwhile a competitor with a simpler product answers the same day and takes an order they did not necessarily deserve.
What is being sold here is speed and consistency, and both are verifiable. Whether your price wins the order is a commercial matter that stays yours: the system quotes what you tell it to quote.
Your logic, out of the spreadsheet and into a system.
- The configurator with your real rules: What combines with what, what is incompatible, what forces something else. The rules that today live in the head of whoever has always quoted become something the system enforces.
- Cost logic with your own numbers: Material by weight or by metre, machining time, finish, tooling, packaging and freight. The calculation stops being a formula only one person can audit.
- Discount thresholds and approvals: Up to a margin, the rep quotes alone. Below it, the quote goes for authorisation with the reason attached. This is what makes speed safe instead of expensive.
- The quote document itself: Generated with your identity, your terms, validity dates and technical specifications, in the language and currency of the market it goes to. No more manual assembly, which is where a wrong number gets pasted into a live quote.
- Integration with the CRM and the ERP: The quote lives as a record with a version history, so what changed between version one and version four is visible. Approved, it becomes an order without being typed a second time.
- A customer-facing configurator when the case allows it: For standardised lines, letting the buyer configure and price on your site changes the sale entirely. For deeply engineered products it does not fit, and we say so instead of selling the shinier version.
When quoting depends on one person and their spreadsheet.
- Manufacturers whose price is calculated per order rather than looked up in a list
- Companies losing orders to whoever answered first
- Businesses where only one or two people can produce a quote
- Teams whose quoting logic lives in a spreadsheet nobody else can audit
- Distributors handling configurable products with dozens of variables
- Exporters who need to quote in several currencies with different terms per market
A catalogue with fixed prices needs an ecommerce store, not a quoting engine, and that is a different discipline with its own page. The line between them is whether your price is looked up or calculated, and the Diagnostic settles which side you are on before anyone builds anything.
Before you sign.
Our products are too complex to systematise. Are they?
That is the most common objection and it is usually about the exceptions rather than the products. The base logic is nearly always expressible; what resists is the handful of special cases. Those stay with a person on purpose, and the system routes them there instead of pretending to price them. Systematising 80% of quotes and routing the rest is a very different week from doing 100% by hand.
Do we have to publish our prices?
No. Who sees a price is a decision you make per product line: internal only, for the sales team, for approved distributors with their own list, or public. Many manufacturers run it entirely internally and still get the whole benefit, because the value is the speed and the consistency, not the publication.
What happens when our costs change?
You change them, and that is the point of the design. Material prices, exchange rates and margins live as parameters you control, not as numbers embedded in code we would have to touch. A system whose supplier has to be called to update a steel price is a system that will be quoting last year's cost.
Can it use the price lists we already have?
Yes, and that is usually the starting point: the existing spreadsheets are the source of the logic, and the first phase is turning them into rules that can be audited. Where those files are inconsistent or contradict the ERP, that is data work with its own scope, and it gets said and quoted separately rather than absorbed silently into the build.
Is this not what our ERP is supposed to do?
Some ERPs include a configurator and when yours does and it fits, using it is the cheaper answer and we will say so. They fall short when the configuration rules are more complex than the module supports, when the sales team cannot reach it from outside the plant, or when the quote document it produces is not something you would send to a customer. The Diagnostic checks what you already own before proposing anything new.
QUOTE IN MINUTES.
NOT IN DAYS.
It starts with the Diagnostic: what standing still is costing you, what fixing it costs, and what gets fixed first — in your own data. Paid work, credited 100% against the fix if you move within 90 days.
Book your Diagnostic ↗