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30 minutes with someone who understands complex product manufacturing. No pressure, no script.
Talk with Sales âThe hidden cost of manual quoting
There is a problem hiding in plain sight inside most manufacturing businesses. It is not on the factory floor. The machines work. The production lines are efficient. The problem is in the office.
A customer sends an inquiry. A sales rep forwards it to engineering. An engineer opens Excel, builds a quote from scratch, something changes, the cycle repeats. Ten revision rounds later, two to three weeks have passed, and a quote is finally ready.
Engineers in ETO manufacturing businesses spend roughly 50% of their working time on quoting. That translates to approximately â¬40,000 per engineer per year in lost productive capacity.
- 20-40% of quotes contain errors that cause rework on the production floor
- 80% of the work done on deals that don't close gets thrown away entirely
This is not a factory problem. It is an office problem.
The buyer has changed
80% of B2B buyers today want to research, configure, and get pricing information before they ever speak to a salesperson.
These are the same people who book flights, order goods, and manage most of their lives online, instantly, without waiting. Then they come to your website and wait two weeks for a quote.
Why standard e-commerce tools fail
A T-shirt has 15 variants â size and colour. Shopify was built for exactly that. Your product, whether it is a door, a window, a façade panel, or a modular building system, has thousands of valid combinations.
So manufacturers try to solve it by bolting tools together: a CMS connected to a PIM, connected to a configurator, connected to CAD, connected to an ERP. Five to seven tools covering one workflow. Tens of thousands of euros a year in integration costs.
The framework: Configure, Price, Quote, Produce
The framework that solves this has four steps: Configure, Price, Quote, Produce. The customer configures their product. The system calculates the price in real time. A quote is generated automatically. And at the same moment, production-ready files are generated â CAD, BIM, BOM â ready for the factory floor.
No engineer in the loop. Not faster. Automatic.
Most CPQ tools stop at the quote document. They generate a PDF with pricing. But the factory still needs CAD drawings, materials lists, production specifications. The fourth step, Produce, is the one that actually changes the economics of the business.
What this requires
- Product logic needs to be codified
- Pricing rules need to be structured
- Output needs to connect directly to production
Case study: Saku Metall
Saku Metall makes doors and entry systems in Estonia. Before implementing Materia, their situation was typical: quotes took two to three weeks, every order went through Excel, email, and manual CAD work, with multiple revision rounds per order.
After implementation:
- Sales cycle went from 2â3 weeks to 2â3 hours â 160Ã faster
- 90â95% of orders are now placed fully self-service, without any engineering involvement
- Production-ready files are generated automatically at the point of configuration
- ROI came in under 3 months
The number worth focusing on is not the speed improvement. It is the 90â95% self-service rate.
What Materia actually replaces
The Storefront
What your customers and sales team interact with: a hybrid webshop with a native 3D CPQ configurator and partner portal.
The Hub
The backend where your product logic lives, where output files are generated automatically, and where order data flows directly into your ERP.
One platform instead of five to seven. No integration overhead. A sales process that operates independently of engineering capacity.
Is this relevant to your business?
Three questions:
- Do you sell configurable products where every order is different?
- Is your current quoting cycle longer than one week?
- Do you want to grow revenue without growing your team?
If yes, the next step is a 30-minute working session where we map your actual quoting process and show you specifically where this applies â and where it does not. No template demo. Your products, your workflow.
Frequently Asked Questions
Shopify and WooCommerce were designed for static goods â products with a fixed SKU, fixed price, and fixed specifications. A T-shirt has 15 variants. A custom door, window, or façade panel has thousands of valid combinations. Standard e-commerce platforms have no concept of configuration logic, cannot generate CAD or BIM files, and cannot validate whether a combination is physically possible.
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. Standard CPQ software automates the creation of a quote document based on product rules and pricing logic. It fails for ETO manufacturers because it stops at the quote document. It does not generate production-ready output â CAD drawings, BIM files, bills of materials â that the factory floor actually needs.
It is a framework for fully automating the sales-to-production cycle for complex engineered products. The customer configures their product, the system calculates the price in real time, a quote is generated automatically, and production-ready files (CAD, BIM, BOM) are generated at the same moment. The fourth step, Produce, is what differentiates this from standard CPQ.
Engineers in ETO manufacturing spend roughly 50% of their working time on quoting rather than engineering. That translates to approximately â¬40,000 per engineer per year in lost productive capacity. Additionally, 20-40% of quotes contain errors that cause rework on the production floor, and 80% of the work done on deals that don't close gets thrown away entirely.
Based on real implementations: sales cycle reduction from weeks to hours, 90-95% of orders processed fully self-service without engineering involvement, automatic generation of production-ready files at the point of configuration, and ROI in under three months.
Materia has native integrations with Directo, Odoo, SAP, Erply, and others. For any system that supports API access, integration is possible.
