Quoting a CAD Product Catalog – How & Why We Take a Personalized Approach to Pricing Your CAD Configurator

Curious to know how we quote a CAD product configurator? Our Senior VP of Business Development breaks down our process and how we give you a personalized quote.

“How much would a CAD product configurator cost for our company?”

In my 14 years with CADENAS PARTsolutions and 21 years working in this industry, I’ve heard this question a lot.

You won’t find your standard quoting table online that breaks down what it will cost to put a product catalog/ CAD configurator on your website. It’s not because there is any “secret” pricing table. It’s because such a table couldn’t take into account all the features that go into creating your online configurator.

The reason is not, “It’s complicated.” The answer is, “It’s personalized.”

Ready to receive a personalized quote for your CAD product catalog? Click here.

It’s a Personalized Process: Your Products, Your Engineers, Your Catalog

We take a very personalized approach to quoting and building your product catalog. It needs to be.

What the electronics manufacturer needs is different from what the cylinder manufacturer needs, as are the needs of companies who deliver BIM downloads. And, the end customers for all these different sectors have different expectations and requirements.

Here are just some things that factor into product configurator pricing:

• Requirements for your product industry
• Quality of your current CAD data
• Your part numbering system
• Complexity of part geometry
• How many products to include in your catalog

Some things that DO NOT factor into product configurator pricing include:

• Reuse the catalog with distributors. You can reuse it anywhere, on any other websites
• User Interface. It can be built for any product series, or even individual product numbers
• Multiple CAD file formats. You get them all, and they are kept up to date year after year.
• It will be mobile compatible and included on the CADENAS Mobile App for your people in the field.
• Inclusion in Catalog Libraries for the major CAD systems. To help extend your product reach to new customers

We look to build trust with you, because we know implementing a product catalog can have a huge effect on your product downloads and sales. Your product data is important to you, so we work to ensure you that your data is secure throughout the process.

Your success is our success, and we want you to feel as confident throughout this process as we are.

Our Process for Quoting Your Catalog: We Start with a Conversation About You.

Within 24 hours of you asking for a product catalog quote, one of our eCATALOGsolutions experts will be in touch with you. Then, we have a conversation. We built this business on relationships – not CAD. We want to know more about your company, your website and your products to understand:

1. If our product will be useful to you, and
2. What you’re hoping to achieve with a product catalog.

If our solution is a fit for your company, that’s great. We’ll then work with you to send us the right data based on what product line you want a quote for. Helpful data to give us includes your PDF catalog, dimension drawings and information of the product lines you want us to quote, your part numbering logic system and 2D and 3D models (if you have them, but not required). We also really like to know overlap between product families as that can reduce the amount of work involved.

Once we have that data, we connect with our engineering team who will use their expertise to determine the necessary rule parameters and proper geometry to represent your products. They will estimate how many hours would go into creating your catalog, and we stick to that estimate. They also write out all the product families included in the estimate and how many parametric product models they would need to build.

In 2-7 business days, we will get back to you with an estimate and a plan for how we can implement your CAD product catalog. The proposal includes the total cost, shows you how we calculated it and an estimate for how long it would take for us to build your catalog.

Making Changes to Your Configurator Down the Road

As we build your product configurator, we don’t increase the price if the process takes longer than what we planned. The proposal you sign is final for those product families.

That being said, we know that companies may need to make changes to their catalog down the line. For product edits and additional families to the catalog, we can set up a maintenance program. This ensures your catalog stays up to date and to your liking without you having to go through the entire implementation process again.

We know that a CAD product catalog is a big project for your team. But our team will manage the project and handle the bulk of the work to make it easy for you. To learn more about how we quote our product catalogs or to start this process for your company, go to our Quick Quote page.

See John’s LinkedIn article.