How a Building Materials Manufacturer Fixed Their Broken Quoting Process and Turned It Into a Product

A regional building materials manufacturer came to us with a quoting problem. Their sales team relied on decade-old spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and manual calculations. Quotes took anywhere from 2 to 48 hours depending on who handled them. Numbers were inconsistent. Errors slipped through. Customers lost confidence. Leadership wanted two things: faster, accurate quotes that didn't depend on one or two veteran employees, and a system they could eventually sell to similar manufacturers in their niche. Core problems included: • Every estimator had their own spreadsheet with different formulas and outdated pricing • Complex configurations for custom materials caused frequent miscalculations • The sales team couldn't see the status of quotes or track revisions • The company had no audit trail, no visibility into margins, and no forecasting metrics • They saw an opportunity to commercialize their internal solution, but nothing they had was scalable

We designed and developed a custom quoting and estimation app tailored to their exact workflow. The system replaced the spreadsheet maze with a structured, predictable workflow that anyone on their team could use. Key features included: • Dynamic product configurator that handled all their custom rules • Real-time margin calculations • Role-based quoting workflow for sales, estimating, and management • Centralized pricing and cost tables with version control • Quote templates, automated PDF generation, and customer-friendly deliverables • Full history tracking and analytics dashboards

Within the first 60 days, quote turnaround time dropped from hours to minutes. Error rates went down almost entirely. Margins became more consistent because the tool enforced accurate cost models. New sales reps could produce quotes without shadowing senior staff. Leadership finally had visibility into volume, close rates, and profitability. After several months of using the system internally, the client recognized a pattern. Other manufacturers in their space were dealing with the same problems. We helped them convert the application into a multi-tenant SaaS product, adding tenant management, permission layers, branding controls, and isolated databases. We established onboarding flows, subscription tiers, and usage-based pricing. We built admin tools so they didn't need developers involved to manage customers, and created white-label capabilities for manufacturers who wanted their own branding. In less than a year, the company went from spreadsheet chaos to running a full quoting platform with paying customers. Their internal efficiency improved and the new SaaS product became a secondary revenue stream. They now sell to manufacturers across the region and are expanding into adjacent markets.