Why your quotes take ten days, and what it takes to get them out in one

A manufacturer of low-voltage electrical panels came to us with one sentence: could we help unload the director and the engineer? A priced quote took about ten days. Nobody could say exactly where the days went.

This is the most common sentence we hear from manufacturers. It is also one of the best-studied problems in industrial engineering. Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Southern Denmark have measured what happens to quoting time when a company writes its rules down and puts them in a system. The numbers are worth knowing before you spend anything.

Where the ten days go

Nobody spends ten days working on a quote. The quote spends ten days waiting. In a typical make-to-order company the path looks like this:

• The request arrives by email with a PDF specification and a drawing. It waits until the engineer opens it.
• The engineer reads the drawing and builds the bill of materials from memory and from a price list. In our client's case the price list was an 85 MB spreadsheet with 20 sheets and hundreds of images.
• The engineer chooses between a component and its cheaper analog. Whether the cheaper one is safe is in the engineer's head.
• The director applies the markup. The formula is in the director's head.
• Someone formats the document. If the client changes one line, the cycle starts again.

Every step is short. Every handover is long. And every handover waits for one of two people.

What the studies measured

The Danish researchers followed companies that put their product and pricing rules into a configuration system built for their own products. The results are consistent.

In four companies studied in detail (Hvam et al., 2013):

• A supplier of cement plants went from three to five weeks to one or two days. Before the change it answered only half of the requests it received. After, it answered all of them. Each quote took one or two person-days instead of fifteen to twenty-five.
• A maker of spray-drying plants went from three to five days to two hours.
• A data-centre supplier went from three to five days to under an hour, and the full order cycle went from 400 days to 16.
• An electrical panel maker with more than 100 employees went from three to five days to ten minutes.

Grundfos, the pump manufacturer, cut quoting time from 9.5 days to 3.4 and the hours spent on it by 75% (Kristjansdottir et al., 2018). A small Italian mould maker went from five or six days to one, according to Forza and Salvador, cited in the same DTU study.

What they actually changed

The interesting part is not the software. In every case the work started with the rules. Which component goes with which. Which substitutions are allowed. How the price is built. Who approves what. The system came second and simply ran those rules the same way every time.

The researchers are honest that the product often changed along the way. Writing the rules down showed which variants made no sense, and engineers simplified them. That is work, and it is done together with the engineers, not around them.

The warning in the same research

One Danish company ran five configurator projects. Three paid for themselves within 12 to 32 months. Two had not paid back after five years (SDU). The reason was not the technology. The tools did not cover the real cases salespeople handled, so they went back to Excel.

Grundfos saved time, but the researchers found no reliable evidence that sales grew because of it. Across the Danish projects, 71 to 91% of the benefit was saved resources, not new orders.

So a faster quote is not a promise of more revenue. It is a promise of fewer hours, fewer unanswered requests and a company that keeps quoting when one person is away. That is usually enough.

What we did for the panel maker

We did not start with the feature they asked for. We started with the structure.

The price list became a catalogue of 1,887 items in 223 analog groups, each with a risk flag that says where a cheaper alternative is fine and where it isn't. The pricing formula — materials, assembly coefficient, cost, markup, VAT — moved out of the director's head and into the system, with the coefficient and markup set per brand by the manager. Orders move across a board from New to Won, and each role sees only its stage. The engineer never sees the margin.

Incoming PDF and DWG drawings are read by a drawing assistant that drafts the panel contents against the catalogue and prices the draft. Every proposed line carries a reason and a reference to the sheet it came from. The engineer confirms each line before anything reaches the client.

Three weeks from idea to production. A priced quote now takes about two days instead of ten. The full story is in Quoted by hand. Then not.

Five questions before you buy anything

1. How many requests a month go unanswered or are answered too late to matter?
2. Who has to touch every quote, and what happens when that person is away for two weeks?
3. Where does the price list live, and how old is the version your team uses?
4. Is the markup formula written down anywhere outside one person's head?
5. Could a new engineer quote a standard order in their first week?

If the answers make you uncomfortable, the problem is structural, and it is solvable. The rules exist. They are just not written down yet.

Related: When the engineer is on holiday, the company stops quoting · CPQ software or a custom quoting system?