For manufacturers of custom doors, railings, partition systems, and pipes: one custom order took up to 16 rounds of email revisions to price. Nothing went wrong, and it still cost weeks.
Key Takeaway: When a quote and a production drawing come from two separate processes, they drift apart, and that drift is expensive. One pipes and drainage manufacturer needed 16 rounds of email revisions before a single custom order was locked in.
Wabric
closes the gap by making the quote, drawing, and bill of materials one object from the start, not three things kept in sync.
The Real Cost of a Mismatched Quote
Every engineer-to-order manufacturer has lived this. Sales sends a quote to avoid losing the order. The customer signs. Weeks later, engineering has to draw it for production, and the geometry doesn't match what the price assumed. That gap is a redesign problem, not a speed problem, and redesign is expensive.
Most manufacturers try to fix it with speed: quote faster, win the order before anyone notices the gap. But speed doesn't close the gap. It just moves it downstream, into production, where it costs more to catch.
The Mechanism Underneath
The manufacturers who've actually closed this gap didn't do it by making sales faster. They did it by getting rid of the handoff between two separate systems, a quoting tool for sales and a CAD system for engineering, and replacing both with one. That single system is Wabric.
Take a manufacturer of modular partition systems and focus rooms for offices and public spaces. A customer used to schedule a call and describe what they wanted. A sales engineer would translate the request into form fields, compile a quote, and email it over. Locking in a final number meant another call to handle the inevitable revision. Now the customer opens a configurator link, sets the room's dimensions, cycles through finishes and door positions while watching a live 3D model update, and downloads a complete quote. A sales engineer might still step in to shake hands, but not to work out the spec by hand.
Underneath, that same configuration is generating the bill of materials, a production-ready drawing set, and the component list needed to build it, at the same moment, from the same input. Nobody has to manually redraw or re-price what the customer just configured. The visual configurator is the top of the iceberg. The quote, the drawing, and the production data were never separate things to begin with. One object generates all three.
This is also where most of the hidden cost lives: in the ordinary back-and-forth that never shows up as a single big error. One pipes and drainage manufacturer measured it directly: a single custom order could bounce between sales and engineering up to 16 times over email before the numbers were finalised, because every dimension change joined the same drawing queue as everything else. None of that shows up as an error on anyone's dashboard. It's just weeks spent relaying information between what a customer wants and what a factory can build.
16 rounds of email revisions. That's what it took to lock in one custom order, before the numbers were even final.
Where the Money Actually Comes Back
The visual configurator is what gets demoed. It's not what makes a manufacturer sign with Wabric. What makes them sign is what happens to their sales and engineering teams once the configurator is also the production system.
That pipes and drainage manufacturer from the section above now has sales reps and partners generating technical drawings and exact costs on their own, with engineering out of the loop for standard work. About 80% of drawings and revisions that used to wait for an engineer now happen instantly, during or right after the client meeting instead of weeks later. Pricing is consistent across every sales rep for the first time.
The same pattern holds everywhere Wabric runs. A manufacturer of glass and metal railings cut the time its sales engineers spent turning emailed drawings into quotes roughly in half. That recovers about 80 hours a month, close to two weeks of one person's working time. The same configuration that prices the railing also exports the drawing as an IFC model that architects and structural engineers can drop straight into Revit or Tekla, so the product is specifiable the moment it's configured, not weeks later.
A manufacturer of garage doors cut its sales cycle from two weeks to two hours, now processes 90 to 95% of orders without a salesperson touching them, and saw payback in under three months.
And the modular partition and focus room manufacturer from the mechanism section went from multi-call, multi-revision sales cycles to a single self-service session, with production receiving a complete, ready-to-build specification the moment the customer downloads their quote.
See what one parametric object replaces. If your sales and engineering teams are still relaying the same order back and forth by email, book a 20-minute Wabric demo and see the mechanism above running against your own product line.
If a change order on a recent project took longer to resolve than the original quote did, that's worth a short conversation, not another spreadsheet fix.
Wabric is a CPQ and PIM platform for manufacturers of complex, engineered products. Customers configure products visually in the browser, and every configuration generates accurate pricing, a bill of materials, production-ready CAD drawings, and BIM/IFC files. No manual quoting, no engineering handovers. Learn more at getwabric.com, or talk with sales.