Every quote priced from the same rules

The bottleneck is a person

In most distributors, accurate pricing lives with one or two people. Everyone can take the enquiry and nobody else can price it, because pricing means knowing the customer tier, the volume breaks, the freight assumptions, and the exception somebody agreed years ago that was never written down.

So quotes queue behind whoever holds that knowledge. That person is also handling the escalations and the difficult conversations, which means the queue moves when they get a quiet hour, and quiet hours are not a reliable feature of the job. A quote that takes three days often arrives after the customer has ordered elsewhere. The customer is not being disloyal. They had a job to schedule, and somebody else answered first.

The usual workaround is to let more people quote and accept that some of the numbers will be wrong. That trades a speed problem for a margin problem, and a margin problem is harder to see and considerably more expensive once a customer has been quoted the wrong figure twice.

The rules, written down once

Quotes & pricing begins with an uncomfortable and useful exercise: the rules get written down. Customer tiers, volume breaks, freight assumptions, the exceptions that were genuinely agreed. Several rules turn out to contradict each other, which was true before and is now visible, and a few turn out to exist only in one person’s head.

From then on, every quote is priced from the same rules. An enquiry that arrives by phone gets the same number as one that arrives by email, and two salespeople quoting the same order reach the same figure, because neither of them is remembering anything.

Anything that falls outside the rules stops and waits for the person who owns pricing. It is not approximated, not rounded to something plausible, and not quietly guessed at to keep things moving. The exceptional waits for judgement. Only the routine moves on its own.

What it does to the day

Quotes go out within the hour rather than by the end of the week, and they go out right, because speed no longer requires guessing. The routine majority of enquiries never touches the person who owns pricing at all.

That person’s day changes shape. Their time goes to the exceptions and the negotiations where judgement actually changes the outcome, and the constant interruptions for numbers that already exist in the rules simply stop. The interruptions were never unreasonable. Colleagues asked because there was no other way to get an answer.

Customers feel it as consistency. The figure quoted last month matches the figure quoted today, whoever picked up the phone, so they stop checking every number they are given.

What the week runs on now

The rules live in Quotes & pricing and every quote is priced from them, however the enquiry arrives and whoever takes it, while anything outside the rules stops and waits for the person who owns pricing, every time and without a shortcut. That shape is deliberate, fast on the routine and unwilling on the exceptional, because the point was never to automate the judgement but to stop the routine work queueing behind the work that needed it.