Engineer-to-order
Only one person in your shop knows how to price a complete machine. That is your best engineer, and that is your biggest risk.
We take that knowledge out of their head and put it into a configurator that produces the quote, the bill of materials and the cost price.
Send us one of your quotesSound familiar?
Let us talk if these sentences sound familiar
"Our quotes take three days. When it is complex, two weeks."
"Only the owner or the senior engineer can price a complete project."
"We lose contracts because we answer too late."
"We bought a configurator. It does not model our rules."
"Every quote starts from an old quote we edit, and nobody knows which one is right any more."
If you ticked three of them, the rest of this page was written for you.
What it changes
Three things change, and none of them is saving paper
01
Response time stops depending on one calendar.
When only one person can price, your ability to answer a tender is capped by their holidays, their meetings and their workload. A configurator lets a salesperson or a junior estimator produce a solid quote, and lets the senior engineer review only what is out of the ordinary.
02
Margin stops being an estimate from memory.
Cost price is computed from the real bill of materials: material, labour by work centre, machine time, subcontracting, overheads. Margin shows while you configure, not three months later once the job is done.
03
Knowledge becomes a company asset.
Engineering rules, shop-floor constraints, rates, mark-ups: written down, versioned, editable. The day someone leaves, they leave with their judgement, not with your ability to price.
What the configurator does
Concretely, what it does
It configures according to your rules. Compatibilities, exclusions, valid ranges, free dimensions and derived calculations. Impossible choices never come up.
It generates the bill of materials. The configuration produces a parts list that can be costed and used in production, not a sales description.
It generates the routing. Operations, work centres, estimated times.
It computes the full cost price. Material, labour, machine, subcontracting, overheads, freight, commissioning.
It holds the margin guardrails. Floor per line and overall, approval triggered automatically past a threshold, mandatory reason for any override.
It produces the proposal. PDF in your colours, conditional blocks, French and English, technical attachments, tender schedules.
It handles revisions. Numbered versions, comparison, automatic expiry, and the price frozen at issue date rather than recomputed after the fact.
It talks to your ERP. Items and costs in, order and bill of materials out.
The other options
Why not Tacton, Salesforce or Excel
Excel works, up to a point. It is fast, it is flexible, and that is exactly why your salespeople go back to it. It breaks when you need to generate a bill of materials, keep a reliable price history, or have someone other than the file's author do the pricing.
Tacton, Configit and platforms of that calibre are excellent. They aim at manufacturers bigger than you. Their cost and implementation time assume a dedicated in-house team. If you have one, go ahead.
Salesforce CPQ has been in end-of-sale since March 2025: no new licences, and innovation has been redirected to Revenue Cloud. Salesforce has announced no end-of-life date and forces nobody to migrate — existing customers keep their support and their critical fixes. So it is not a deadline, it is a trajectory: the product stops evolving under you. The real cost of a configurator is not what the licence invoice says.
Implementation cost commonly runs two to three times the annual licence. An order of magnitude put forward by integrators in the field, who have a commercial interest in saying so. Treat it as such.
How it unfolds
Five steps, and the first one costs you nothing
01
1. A real quote, rebuilt in front of you.
Before any agreement. You send us a recent quote, we show you what it becomes.
02
2. Framing.
We pick one product family, a single one. We map the current process, inventory the rules, connect the ERP.
03
3. First scope in production.
A narrow scope, but complete end to end: configuration, cost, margin, proposal, write-back to the ERP. A real quote has to come out of it and go to a real customer.
04
4. Adoption.
Training on your live deals, measurement of actual usage, correction of whatever gets in the way.
05
5. Widening.
The next product families, one at a time, with rules your team now edits itself.
Send us a machine quote. The ugliest one.
The one that took three weeks, the one with hidden tabs and a mark-up nobody can explain any more. That is the interesting one.
Your quote is only ever used to build your example. Never shown to a third party, never cited as a reference without your written consent.