The Pricing Dilemma: From Spreadsheets to Solutions
Joshua Martin remembers the frustration well. As the Digital Projects Lead at CMTP, a specialist packaging company with 11 manufacturing sites across Australia, he watched sales teams struggle with outdated spreadsheets and manual pricing processes daily.
“Before implementing CPQ, our quoting process could take up to two days,” Joshua recalls. “Each of our locations maintained their own pricing spreadsheets, which meant inconsistencies across sites and constant manual updates whenever material costs changed.”
This scenario plays out in manufacturing companies worldwide. At Frameless Hardware Company (FHC), a leading supplier of custom glass and glazing products in the United States, the situation was equally challenging.
“It’s a business based on custom hardware—custom-sized doors and openings with multiple options for glass types, handle types, colors, heights, widths,” explains Christian Rodriguez, President and CEO at FHC. “All that quoting was previously done through Excel. But the problem was the prices were never up-to-date from the manufacturing side.”
The Real-Time Pricing Revolution
For both companies, the game-changer was implementing a CPQ system that delivered a real-time pricing engine integrated directly with their existing systems. This technology fundamentally altered how they approached customer quotes and, by extension, their entire sales process.
CMTP integrated Epicor CPQ with their ERP platform to automatically incorporate current cost information into quotes as they were being generated. No more manually checking spreadsheets or calling the procurement department to verify the latest material costs—everything was instantly available and continuously updated to reflect changing market conditions, delivering an accurate price signal to customers that reflected true production costs and value.
FHC took a similar approach, creating a unified system where pricing data flowed seamlessly between their configurator and other business systems. As Jesse Dorado, Technical Sales at FHC, notes: “Processing large quotes and entering them into the system used to take 1-2 hours. Using CPQ, we can now complete the same task in just 10-15 minutes at most…it automatically connects to our systems—no manual input.”
From Days to Minutes: The Transformation Timeline
The impact of real-time pricing on quoting efficiency has been significant for both manufacturers:
- CMTP: Reduced quoting time from two days to 5-10 minutes
- FHC: Cut large quote processing time from 1-2 hours to 10-15 minutes
These dramatic improvements weren’t just about speed—they were about accuracy. With real-time pricing, both companies eliminated the risk of quoting based on outdated costs or miscalculated margins. Every quote now reflected current market conditions and company pricing strategies.
Beyond Speed: The Competitive Advantage of Real-Time Pricing
While faster quote generation is an obvious benefit, the strategic advantages of real-time pricing extend much further, as both CMTP and FHC discovered.
1. Enhanced Customer Confidence
When customers receive comprehensive, accurate quotes in minutes rather than days, it fundamentally changes their perception of your business. For CMTP, this meant delivering quotes complete with CAD drawings almost instantly, strengthening their reputation for reliability and innovation in the packaging industry.
FHC took this a step further by implementing visual configurators that allowed customers to see their custom glass products with accurate pricing in real time. “A customer can go in, design their product, pick the color, size, bells, and whistles, and receive a quote. At the end, a nice drawing shows all the parts and custom features,” says Armando Rodriguez, Vice President of Manufacturing at FHC.
2. Empowered Sales Teams
With real-time prices, sales representatives at both companies were liberated from time-consuming manual calculations and data entry. At CMTP, this meant a centralized quoting system that harmonized operations across all sites, eliminating inconsistencies and ensuring a streamlined approach.
For FHC, the change was equally profound. Sales team members could now configure complex products without specialist knowledge, making the sales process effortlessly scalable. As Reid Lehner, President at SKO Solutions (FHC’s implementation partner) explains: “Sales uses CPQ to get the accurate pricing quote, which then flows through our existing systems, like our proprietary D3 order management system, and then on to manufacturing.”
3. Strategic Resource Allocation
Perhaps most importantly, real-time pricing allowed both companies to redirect valuable technical resources away from quote creation and toward higher-value activities.
At FHC, the impact on the engineering department was dramatic: 90% of orders no longer required manual engineering work, freeing technical staff to focus on the most complex custom orders instead of routine configurations.
Similarly, CMTP’s integration of Epicor CPQ with Solidworks meant CAD files were automatically generated for every quote, eliminating manual drafting and allowing the engineering department to focus on innovation rather than transactional work.
Implementing Real-Time Pricing: Lessons from the Front Lines
Based on the experiences of CMTP and FHC, here are key considerations for manufacturers looking to leverage real-time pricing through CPQ:
- Integration is non-negotiable: Both companies succeeded because they integrated CPQ with their existing ERP and CAD systems. Real-time pricing requires real-time data flow between systems.
- Centralization creates consistency: CMTP’s implementation of a “single source of truth” for pricing across 11 sites eliminated inconsistencies and improved company-wide efficiency.
- Visualization enhances value: FHC found that combining real-time pricing with 3D visualization substantially increased customer engagement and confidence in the quoting process.
- Empower non-technical users: Both companies benefited from making complex configuration accessible to non-specialists through intuitive interfaces and visual programming.
The Future of Real-Time Pricing
Looking ahead, both CMTP and FHC are planning to extend their real-time pricing capabilities directly to customers. CMTP aims to make their visual product configurator available for self-serve transactions, while FHC continues to develop customer-facing configuration tools that reflect accurate, real-time prices.
As manufacturing faces increasing price volatility in raw materials and evolving demand patterns, these pricing strategies become even more crucial for maintaining competitiveness.
As Joshua Martin of CMTP puts it: “Just getting away from the spreadsheets has been fantastic” But the real victory for both companies goes beyond eliminating manual processes—it’s about transforming pricing from a time-consuming administrative burden into a powerful competitive advantage.
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