Quotations in Minutes, Not Days

Ask a company how it prices its work and you'll often hear a name, not a process. "Oh, Sunil handles the quotes." That's the whole system — Sunil, and the spreadsheet only Sunil really understands. It works until Sunil is on leave, or busy, or the file finally breaks.

A manufacturer I worked with had exactly this. A price quotation was a multi-day job: pull numbers from a complex spreadsheet, work out the bill of materials by hand, calculate the margin, route it for approval. Every step was manual, every step was slow, and every step was easy to get subtly wrong. A misread cell could mean quoting below cost — and nobody would notice until the deal was already won.

What we actually built

The instinct with quotation work is to "clean up the spreadsheet." That's treating the symptom. The real problem is that the logic isn't anywhere a system can act on it — it's trapped in formatting and one person's habits.

So we moved the logic out of the file and into a system. An enquiry now becomes a complete, costed quotation in minutes. The bill of materials is assembled automatically. Margins are calculated as the quote is built, not discovered afterward. And because every quote draws from the same pricing source, the numbers are consistent to the rupee — no two versions of the truth.

Approval used to be a bottleneck because everything went to the same person regardless of size or risk. Now deals route based on margin health: a healthy, standard quote moves fast; a thin-margin or unusual one lands in front of the right approver with the reason attached. The human still makes the call — they just make it with the full picture instead of chasing it.

The part leadership cared about most

The quotes were the visible win. The quieter one was visibility itself. For the first time, leadership could see total pipeline value, average margin across open deals, and exactly which deals needed attention — without asking anyone to assemble a report. The pricing knowledge that used to be a single point of failure became something the whole team could rely on.

This one didn't go live overnight. We built it, demonstrated it to leadership, refined it on real feedback, and moved it toward full rollout — the right pace for something that touches every deal the company makes.

If your pricing lives in one head and one file, you don't have a pricing process. You have a pricing risk. The fix is rarely a better spreadsheet. It's getting the logic somewhere a system — and your whole team — can finally use it.