Roughly a few hours a week.
That's your side of it.
The question nobody answers honestly before you sign
how much of your time does this actually take, and what happens if it goes wrong?
Here is the whole process, the parts that are ours, the parts that are unavoidably yours, and
what we've built into it so a project can't quietly stall the way the last one did.
Software projects rarely fail.
They stall.
Almost nobody tells you their implementation collapsed.
They tell you it's "on hold", or "phase two", or that they're "waiting on
internal resource."
What happened is nearly always the same.
The licence was bought and the kickoff happened. Then the work of
modelling the products every rule, every price, every exception carried in someone's head for twenty years landed on a person who already had a full-time job. Progress became dependent on their spare evenings. There weren't many.
Everything below exists to keep that from happening again.
The software was fine.
The delivery model assumed you had a spare person. You don’t.
What's ours,
What's yours
Yours
Ours
Realistically: one person who knows how your products are quoted, a few hours a week during discovery,
and review time after that. Not a project manager. Not a product owner. Not meetings.
PHASE 1 . BEFORE YOU COMMIT Thirty minutes and
one real quote.STEP 01 · THE CALL You show us
how you quote today.Not a discovery workshop and not a demo of our software. You walk us through one real enquiry ideally a messy one and we ask questions about how the price was arrived at.
By the end you'll have an honest read: what could be automated, what couldn't, roughly what it would cost and how long it would take. Including, sometimes, that you don't need us.Your time: 30 minutes. Cost: none. Obligation: none.
STEP 02 · PROPOSAL , OR A SMALLER FIRST STEP A scoped proposal or a paid pilot
if you'd rather see us work.If it's a fit, you get a proposal with a fixed scope and a fixed price. Projects start from €25,000. If you'd rather not commit that on the strength of a conversation,
we'll propose a pilot instead: one product family, one part of the configuration, built for real with your actual data.
At the end you either continue or you don't and you keep what we built either way.NDA signed before anything sensitive is shared. Send yours or use ours.
PHASE 02 · DISCOVERY We write your product logic down.
You sign it off.STEP 03 . DOCUMENTING THE RULES The part that decides whether
the project works.We sit with the people who actually do the quoting and work through real cases the standard ones first, then the awkward ones,
then the ones where the answer is "it depends who's asking. "Every variant, rule, price and exception gets documented.
This is slow and it involves asking the same question several ways, because a configurator built on an assumption is a
configurator that quotes the wrong number. Most clients tell us the document is valuable on its own. It's often the first time their pricing
logic has existed anywhere outside the heads of the people running it.Your time: a few hours a week, from one person who knows the product.
You approve this document before any code is written.PHASE 3 . BUILD You see it working early,
while direction can still change.STEP 04 . FIRST WORKING VERSION - 8 TO 12 WEEKS Your actual product,
in software you can use.Not a prototype and not a slide deck. A working version with your real product range in it, early enough that if
something is wrong it can still be changed cheaply.Your time: review and feedback.
STEP 06 . FULL BUILD AND INTERGRATION Rules, interface,
documents, ERP, CRM.The complete logic, the outputs quote, bill of materials, drawings
and the connections to whatever you already run. We integrate with your existing systems rather than replacing them.Your time: access to your systems, and answers when we hit an edge case.
STEP 07 . TESTED AGAINST YOUR OWN QUOTES We run your history through it and explain
every difference.Before go-live, your historical enquiries go through the system and the output is compared against what your team actually quoted. Every discrepancy gets explained or fixed.
This is the step that answers the question keeping you awake: what if it prices something wrong?PHASE 04 · Live Internal first. Then sales.
Then customers.STEP 07 · GO - LIVE — 03 T O6 MONTHS FROM START In stages,
not all at once.Your own team uses it first, on real enquiries, in parallel with the old method.
Then sales. Then, where relevant, your customers or your dealer network.
Nobody's first experience of the system is a customer's.STEP 08 . THREE MONTHS OF MAINTENANCE , THEN NOTHING The system runs
on its own.Three months of maintenance are included after go-live, plus email support throughout.
After that, in most cases, nothing no licence renewal, no per-user fees, no annual invoice arriving whether you use it or not.
When you add a product line or change pricing logic, you have two options: ad-hoc work quoted per change,
or a support retainer. Most clients start ad-hoc and move to a retainer as their range grows.
Where this goes wrong
Two things genuinely slow projects down, and both are
worth knowing before you start.
Nobody can answer the pricing questions.
If the person who knows how quotes are built is unavailable for weeks, discovery stalls and this is the one part we can't do for you. It's a few hours a week, but it has to be someone who actually knows.
The rules turn out not to exist.
Occasionally what looked like consistent logic is genuinely case-by-case judgement, made differently by different people. When we find that, we tell you. Sometimes the answer is a smaller system than you hoped for; sometimes it's that you don't need one at all.
We'd rather lose a deal than overpromise.
You'll hear the awkward version on the first call, not in month four.
Four things built
into every project
You approve the logic
before code exists.
The specification is signed off first.
Most errors get caught there, on paper,
where they cost nothing to fix.
Source code sits in escrow.
Released to you automatically if we cease
trading or the agreement ends. Whatever
happens to us, your quoting doesn't stop.
Your data stays in the EU.
Servers in Germany, GDPR compliant, signed data processing
agreement before the project begins.
One named contact, in your hours.
The same person from first call through go-live and after.
Reachable 08:00–16:00 CET, Monday to Friday.
Start with thirty minutes.
One real enquiry, start to finish. We'll tell you what could be automated,
what couldn't, and roughly what it would cost and we'll introduce you to a client who has been through this.