Product configurator for a local manufacturer

The problem

Quotes were produced by hand, in a spreadsheet. Every request meant twenty minutes of filling in a table, and half the requests never turned into an order. The real cost was not the time — it was the customers who gave up because the answer arrived the next day.

What I built

A configurator where you pick the material, the dimensions and the fittings, and the price recalculates on every change. The pricing rules live in the database, not in the code, so the team edits them themselves from a panel.

• Server-side validation for every combination, so nothing unbuildable can be ordered
• A PDF quote generated from the same data
• A full history: who configured what, and when

What was hard

The pricing rules had exceptions that were written down nowhere — they lived in the heads of two people in production. The first month was more interview than programming.

The first version was too flexible. The second was too rigid. The third is the one where simple rules > stay simple and exceptions are written down as exceptions.

Outcome

Time from request to quote dropped from a day to a few minutes. Requests doubled in the first quarter, because people start configuring out of curiosity.