ZARGES: From 15 Minutes
to 90 Seconds Per Quote

The Real Cost of Outdated Configuration Software 

ZARGES' portfolio spans highly complex, customer-specific solutions across demanding sectors including defense, logistics, and medical industries, where no two orders are the same.  Getting a configuration wrong isn't just inefficient; it can have serious compliance implications. 

Yet the tools behind the quoting process were never built for that reality. For some product categories, legacy configurators existed but were heavy and outdated. For boxes and packaging solutions, there was no configurator at all, quotes were built manually in SAP (ERP), with sales reps clicking together individual part numbers from memory, no validation, no structure, and no safety net. If someone added five components when a box could only fit two, nobody caught it. Unusual cases required digging through Excel sheets and technical norms just to verify whether a configuration was even legally permitted, a process that even the most experienced reps struggled with.

Even less complex orders required R&D to step in, searching through past drawings and adapting them before production could begin. A team of skilled engineers spent valuable time on administrative work instead of what they do best: developing the next generation of ZARGES products. 

Elfsquad changed all of that. Today, every configuration is technically correct, commercially accurate, and legally valid, all automatically. R&D no longer has to be part of the quoting process, and the plant receives structured, processable orders. With a high volume of orders per year flowing through ZARGES' operation, even minimal gains in processing efficiency translate into significant results at scale. 

"I used to spend so much mental energy on validating and calculating configurations. Now that's all handled by the platform, giving me time to actually focus on the customer."

Sales Team

ZARGES

Why ZARGES Chose a Configurator They Could Own Themselves

ZARGES had a clear goal during their search: a platform they could own, configure, and evolve themselves, without waiting for consultants every time a product rule changed or a new variant needed to be added. A solution that would keep up with the business, adapting to new product specifications, pricing changes, and market demands.

Elfsquad fits that vision perfectly. "Rather than a system that locks knowledge in the hands of specialists, Elfsquad gives us direct control over our own product rules, pricing logic, and configuration models," says Valentin. "We don't need IT or consultants to make changes; we can do everything ourselves. That was exactly what we were looking for."

When it came to selecting a platform, ZARGES made a deliberate strategic choice. "We deliberately chose a platform that moves with our business, one with open APIs that gives us the freedom to extend and build on top of it as we grow. That flexibility was a key factor in our decision," says Valentin. Where traditional CPQ platforms offer stability at the cost of flexibility, ZARGES chose a platform that could scale and adapt as fast as they do. Elfsquad's open APIs proved that choice right from day one. A seamless 3D visualisation integration sealed the deal, giving the sales team a powerful visual tool to bring configurations to life. 

From Workshop to Go-Live: Delivered on Time and on Budget 

From the start, ZARGES took a scoped, step-by-step approach, tackling the implementation in focused phases rather than trying to change everything at once. The result speaks for itself: the project was delivered on time and on budget. "It was one of the rare IT projects that really worked on time and on budget," Valentin notes, a result of careful preparation, a scoped approach, and close collaboration with Elfsquad's team.

Throughout the entire process, hands-on support was provided to help ZARGES model their product logic correctly. "It was really valuable, great pre-sales and advisory support. The team is very happy," says Valentin. When unexpected sales process complexities emerged in the final weeks before go-live, Elfsquad's customer success team was ready to help find solutions fast, even within 24 hours.

The SAP ERP integration became the backbone of the operation. Today, hundreds of thousands of CRM contacts are kept up to date nightly. Customer-specific pricing conditions sync in real time across ZARGES' global network of 13 national companies and international sales partners. Order simulation runs directly in SAP ERP, and once an order is placed, shipment notifications follow automatically. Sales, engineering, and operations all work from one shared model, one source of truth. 

The Sales Team That Went From Sceptical to Unstoppable 

Change is never easy, especially for a sales team that has developed deep product knowledge over years of experience. The initial reaction to Elfsquad was cautious. Team members worried about losing control, about having to relearn their process, about whether a configurator could really handle the edge cases they had spent years mastering manually.

The doubts didn't last long past the first quotation. Valentin recalls one sales rep putting it perfectly: "I used to spend so much mental energy on validating and calculating configurations. Now that's all handled by the platform, giving me time to actually focus on the customer."  The constant background anxiety of building a quote that might be wrong has disappeared.

What once took 15 minutes of manual configuration work, selecting components, checking compatibility, calculating pricing, now takes 90 seconds via the configurator, and is always correct. That is not a small improvement in a single step. For a sales team managing complex customer-specific orders across defence, logistics, and medical sectors, it is a fundamental shift in how they work.

Sales reps, who adopted Elfsquad early on, saw the benefits immediately and never looked back. They convinced colleagues, shared best practices, and the platform's adoption grew naturally from there. As Valentin puts it: "It makes their work a lot more fun." 

This is what scaling without losing control looks like in practice. Each new product ZARGES adds to Elfsquad is configured entirely by their own team, shaped around their own rules and their own customers. And because their team owns the platform completely, scaling to new products and markets is entirely in their own hands. As Valentin puts it: "It's an open, easy-to-integrate platform, and one that I'm confident will keep developing in exactly the direction we need."

For ZARGES, Elfsquad is the CPQ platform behind their quoting process, enabling a global manufacturer of premium, customer-specific solutions to scale profitably without losing what makes them unique.