Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1535954
12 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2025 That's interesting because it would seem that the most common tool for quoting and sales management is an in-house software, likely an Excel spreadsheet. Don't get me wrong, Excel spreadsheets can be legitimate tools. You can automate a lot of things in Excel. You can even tie it into distribution APIs and get real-time data. ere's a lot you can do with a VBA (visual basic application). I used to joke with the team at CalcuQuote that if I were doing quotes for myself, I would probably create a very heavy Excel spread- sheet full of macros. e problem is that as your company matures, if you have the skills to build such an Excel spreadsheet, you're prob- ably capable of doing other value-added activ- ities, so you have to delegate the maintenance of that tool. Now you delegate that responsibility to someone who doesn't know how to use or maintain that technology, so you need to cre- ate something simpler and off the shelf that requires less maintenance. If you are a small 10- or 20-person family-run business and your son or daughter is the household techie who also does the quotes, then build the fancy spread- sheet with the VBA, and that's fine. But as soon as you get into any kind of scale, that solution falls apart very quickly. Where's the trade-off, Chintan? Where does a company move from having the value in rolling its own to moving up to a third-party solution? e trade-off these days continues to lower as soware becomes more accessible. On one hand, it's easier than ever to create soware. All these low-code solutions are out there. You can use something like Google Scripts or Air- table, so people start to think they can build their own because it's so easy. You don't necessarily have to get into the code anymore. You can actually use a lot of platforms to build these integrations. But at some point, you are faced with the same prob- lem. If your techie had the VBA skills before, they're now expected to go beyond that knowl- edge. If you have the platform knowledge to do low-code, the expectation remains that it's not just about automating formulas. Now it's about real-time fetching of information. How quickly can you fetch the information, and how do you process that? It's also much larger data sets today than in the past. Here's an example: Take a standard-size bill of material, let's say with 50 line items, and you quote five different quantities. Each line item has some AVLs associated with it, and you will source from 20 different suppliers for each line item. Imagine the data you just created: 50 line items x AVL x quantity x source. An Excel spreadsheet will quickly fall apart when you get into a multi-level assembly or a family of quotes. e threshold continues to advance, so even if you believe in the low-code type solutions, at some point, you will hit a barrier where you say, "I need some professional-grade soware." Let's say you move away from Excel, and you tackle a low-code solution like Airtable. Does that help you understand what you're looking for when talking to a third party? ose types of solutions are great if you run a super small lifestyle business, but as soon as you want to scale, you'll look for professionally maintained soware. ere are so many rea- sons for that choice. One is the maintenance, Chintan Sutaria