Quoted by hand. Then not.

There was no system at all. Quotes were assembled by hand in Excel across a 20-sheet, 85 MB price list. The pricing logic — what markup applied to which manufacturer, how the assembly coefficient worked — lived entirely in one engineer’s head. The director had no view of the pipeline: which orders were active, which were stalled, what the business was worth at any moment. When the engineer was unavailable, nothing moved.

A kanban-style order pipeline — New, Sales, Engineering, Sign-off, Quote, Won — where each of four roles sees and edits only its part, and only the manager, head of sales and director can see money. The 85 MB price list became a structured catalogue of 1,887 items across 223 analog groups, each carrying a risk flag for where a cheaper alternative is safe and where it isn’t. Pricing runs a transparent formula every time: materials, assembly coefficient, cost, markup, VAT. An assistant converts client DWG and PDF drawings, reads them, drafts panel contents against the catalogue and prices the draft — every proposed line tagged with a rationale and a drawing-sheet reference, and confirmed by the engineer before it reaches a quote. Every order produces branded Quote and Specification documents with version history, exporting to Excel and print. The director gets a real-time dashboard: revenue, funnel amounts, conversion, average deal size, and orders stuck in one stage for more than 14 days.