BERCOMEX: From Two Weeks
to Two Hours Per Quote

The Hidden Cost of Quoting by Memory

Behind every Bercomex machine was a quote built from an Excel file. Not a single file, but a collection of macro-driven spreadsheets, one per machine type. Each carried years of layered logic that lived nowhere else: not in a system, not in a manual, only in the heads of the people who used it. When anything changed, a product or a price, every relevant sheet had to be updated by hand. Quoting a repeat order meant reaching for an old spreadsheet, possibly out of date, carrying all its errors along with it.

The system had no structure to catch mistakes. Anyone could select components that were technically incompatible, a left-hand machine paired with a right-hand module, and nothing would flag it. The inside sales team functioned as a secondary review layer, catching errors before orders reached production. When asked how many quotes were correct on first entry, the answer was simple and clear, namely around 10 percent.

The financial consequences accumulated quietly but consistently. Bercomex machines range from €40,000 to over €1.2 million. A misquoted component or a miscalculated price carried a high cost. Across a full order book, those errors added up to thousands of euros per period in unnecessary warranty claims, corrections, and margin give-backs.

Perhaps the most revealing symptom: if five sales people received the same customer brief, they'd produce five completely different machine configurations. Everyone had their own preferences, their own approach. There was no real sales team, just individual sellers each carrying their own version of the product knowledge in their head. That made bringing new people up to speed exceptionally hard. A new hire would spend 1.5 to 2 years reaching genuine independence, and even then, alignment with colleagues was never guaranteed.

The need for change was clear. What Bercomex needed was a platform that could do what the spreadsheets never could: capture the knowledge, enforce the logic, and scale with the business.

"The first reactions from our sales partners, they fell off their chairs. They'd request a quote and an hour later they had it!"

Piet Stroet

Sales Export Manager, Bercomex

Why Bercomex Chose a CPQ Platform They Could Manage Themselves

When Bercomex set out to find a solution, one thing quickly became clear: most configurator platforms came with a hidden dependency. Building or changing a configuration model required developers, people who could write HTML or JavaScript. Every product update, every new variant, every rule change meant going back to specialists, paying consultants by the hour.

With Elfsquad, the entire platform can be managed by the people who know the products, without writing a single line of code. "The other configurators required programming knowledge, HTML, JavaScript. With Elfsquad, you can build a model without that. That was one of the reasons we chose it," recalls Piet Stroet, Sales Export Manager at Bercomex.

The connection with the Elfsquad team also mattered. Bercomex found in Elfsquad a partner that understands manufacturing, not just the concept of it, but from having worked in it. Elfsquad genuinely understood the challenge, and could move alongside Bercomex rather than simply deliver a tool. That proved to be as important as the software itself.

No Code, No Consultants: How Bercomex Took Full Control of Their CPQ

Bercomex took a deliberate approach to implementation. One inside sales employee was freed from his regular responsibilities entirely and given one job: build the configurator. Working with Elfsquad's team in the early stages, and guided by the deep product and customer knowledge of the sales team, he systematically translated years of spreadsheet logic, machine by machine, into structured, rule-driven configuration models. That combination of sales knowledge, product familiarity, and customer understanding proved critical and delivered a CPQ solution the entire team could trust.

The integration architecture became one of the most important outcomes of the project. Bercomex runs three systems: Isah as their ERP, SuperOffice as their CRM, and Elfsquad as their CPQ layer. Elfsquad is the hub that ties them together. Every quote request starts in SuperOffice, from there Elfsquad is triggered automatically, pulling in customer data and pre-populating the configuration. Articles, commercial texts, and pricing all flow live from Isah. Once a quote is completed, Elfsquad saves it as a formatted PDF back into SuperOffice. At the back end, the correct production articles are pushed directly into Isah, no manual transfers, no re-entry.

The reliability of that data flow eliminated an entire category of manual work. Previously, confirming that a finished quote matched the ERP meant printing out both documents, laying them side by side, and going through every line by hand. That check no longer exists. If a configuration contains an error, the import to Isah simply fails and stops, surfacing the issue immediately rather than passing it silently into production. Today, 22 configuration models are live in Elfsquad, one for every machine type in their portfolio.

Faster, Smarter, and Built to Scale

The impact was immediate. Sales partners who had grown used to waiting weeks for a quote suddenly had one in their inbox within hours. "The first reactions from our sales partners, they fell off their chairs. They'd request a quote and an hour later they had it!" But speed was only the beginning.

Where the old ERP-generated output consisted of half-commercial, half-technical details the customer never needed to see, the Elfsquad output was clean, structured, and ready to send. Bercomex's quote document became a reference point, used by their implementation partner as an example of what a professional machine offer can look like.

Behind the speed is something more important: reliability. Every configuration that comes out of Elfsquad is technically valid. Incompatible components cannot be combined, dependencies are enforced automatically, and when a rule needs updating, it is only updated once in one place. The effect rippled through the entire business. As quoting became standardised, the product mix followed. Bercomex is now selling more of the same configurations, creating the conditions to build machines to stock and drive production costs down substantially.

Perhaps the deepest change is what happened to the sales team itself. Where there had previously been individual sellers, each carrying their own version of product knowledge in their head, there is now a real team. Everyone works from the same shared configuration logic and builds on each other's experience. The knowledge that once lived only in individual heads is now held in the platform, visible, transferable, and improving over time. "Not for a single moment," recalls Sandra, when asked if the team ever missed the old Excel sheets.