Nobody complains about a slow configurator in a meeting. They just stop using it. The quotation goes back into the spreadsheet, the sales engineer calls the office, and the system that was supposed to speed things up quietly becomes the slow way of doing them.
Slow systems do not fail visibly
A configurator that pauses after every choice is used reluctantly by sales and abandoned by customers. There is no error message, no outage, no ticket. The usage figures simply drift down — and the old spreadsheet comes back.
Every second is multiplied
A few seconds sound harmless. But every second of waiting is multiplied by every option, every quotation and every user, every day:
Example values — put in your own. And this only counts the waiting, not the quotations that were never finished.
Your internal team is not a load test
Five people testing the system in the office tell you nothing about the morning when the whole sales team and your customers use it at once. If customer-facing access is anywhere in the plan, ask what happens when concurrent use is several times higher — and whether anyone has actually measured it rather than estimated it.
In-house, load capacity is whatever was bought on day one. When demand grows, the system waits for a hardware approval that may never come.
Ask for response times in writing
Speed is a property you can specify, measure and guarantee — like any other. Ask how long a configuration step takes, how long a complete quotation takes, measured under realistic load, and what happens when those figures are missed. A written commitment looks something like this:
| One configuration step | under 0.5 seconds, for 95 % of requests |
| Complete quotation including PDF | under 5 seconds |
| Measured under | five times the expected peak of concurrent users |
| Reported | monthly, from production — not from a test |
| When a figure is missed | a defined remedy, agreed in the contract |
A supplier who will not commit to a number has not measured it.
Usable on a phone, on site
Sales work on site, not at a desk. A tool that technically works on mobile but is unusable on mobile gets used after the visit, from memory — and that is where errors come from.
Faster than the spreadsheet it replaces
Sales will not switch to a tool that costs them time, however much better the result is. Time a typical quotation, start to finish, against the way your team does it today. If the new way is slower, the old way survives in parallel — and no amount of training will change that.
What to ask before you buy
- How fast is one configuration step, and a complete quotation — measured, not estimated?
- What happens at five times our expected number of concurrent users?
- Which response times will you commit to in writing, and what happens when they are missed?
- Can our sales team quote on a phone, on site, over a mobile connection?
- Is a typical quotation faster than with our spreadsheet today?
These are questions 19, 20 and 25 of our buyer’s checklist for product configurators. Why load capacity is so hard to keep in-house is covered in Why In-House Hosting Is Like Building Your Own Aircraft.