What CPQ Actually Is | And the Four Things You Decide First

If you've ever made anything to measure, you have probably run into the term CPQ without anyone explaining it. It stands for Configure, Price, Quote. This covers what those three steps look like in practice, and then the four things you have to decide before anybody can build one for you, which is the part that actually determines whether it works. Full write-up and transcript: https://www.ebsoftware.co.uk/videos/w... Made-to-measure breaks how pricing normally works. Normally, a thing has a price; somebody decided it, and it is written down. If every job is a different size, there is nothing to write a price against until somebody gives you the measurements, so you have to work out the price every time from the numbers the customer typed in. That is why a configurator is a separate piece of software rather than a page on a website. The four things, all of which have to come from you rather than from a developer: What you can physically make, because the software cannot work out your workshop's limits on its own. In the video, an over-wide door is split into two panels automatically, with the reason shown, and it can only do that because somebody wrote the limit down. What changes the price and what doesn't, including options that only cost more when combined with something else. Most businesses have never written this down. It lives in the head of whoever does the quoting. What you would refuse outright- so impossible combinations are off the table before a customer can order one. And who changes it all afterwards, because material costs move and ranges change? If every update means ringing a developer, updates stop happening. What comes out at the end is a priced quote for the customer and a cut list for the workshop, both built from measurements the customer typed in themselves, with nobody re-typing a dimension anywhere. This is a demonstration build with dummy data, not an off-the-shelf product. Want to watch the whole configurator running instead? https://www.ebsoftware.co.uk/videos/p... Product configurator software: https://www.ebsoftware.co.uk/product-... Quoting and estimating software: https://www.ebsoftware.co.uk/quoting-... EB Software is a trading name of Expect Best Ltd, Poole, Dorset. We've built custom business software for UK companies since 2010. Request a quote: https://www.ebsoftware.co.uk/contact