PortfolioWednesday, October 14, 2026

Customer Case Study · PCB supplier · Quote pricing

Pricing without the Power App,
on a platform the business owns.

A South African printed-circuit-board supplier priced every customer quote in a Microsoft Power Apps tool called Quote Builder. In eight weeks ScaleMind rebuilt the pricing function inside the supplier's own operations platform, connected it directly to Business Central, and carried twenty months of quote history across. Quoting never stopped.

8,338

quotes migrated

24,541

price lines preserved

5

automation flows retired

8 weeks

first template to cut-over

The challenge

One price, two systems.

Quote Builder worked, but it had grown into a Power App with 133 pricing columns, five automation flows and a database that Business Central only partly mirrored. Every improvement meant editing the app and the flows, and only 33 licensed people could open it.

01Before: Quote Builder on Power Apps

02After: RFQ pricing on the supplier's own platform

Pricing data held in Dataverse, then copied into Business Central

One pricing record in the supplier's own database

Business Central's copy used only to print the quote document

Business Central written once, directly, from the selected price

Add-line and order-transfer pop-ups still read the old Dataverse data

Sales quote created in Business Central by the platform itself

Freight, markup and surcharge rules hard-wired into app columns

Cost model defined as templates, changed without a rebuild

33 named licences; sales and operations priced blind

Any staff member with the permission can view or price

PCB build specs re-typed from the tech sheet

Specs read straight from the tech sheet

No way to see what was quoted last time while pricing

Full quote history one click away on every pricing line

No RFQ pipeline, approvals or audit outside the app

Nine-stage RFQ pipeline with approvals, notes and audit

Results

What changed for the business.

Two

One

Pricing system of record

Business Central written once from the selected price.

App → flow → Dataverse → BC

Direct

Path to Business Central

One platform action, results recorded on the quote.

33 licences

All staff

Who can see pricing

Controlled by permission, not by licence count.

Not available

1 click

History while pricing

24.5k historic lines plus every new quote.

Before

What it looked like: pricing one line in Quote Builder.

Every quote line was priced by typing into a long column of cells. Freight tables, exchange rates and margin factors all lived on the same screen, and the formulas behind them were buried in the app.

**The line.** Supplier, mode of freight, lead times, quantity and supplier cost typed in per line. Build specification was re-typed rather than read from the tech sheet.

**Air costing.** Rate per kilogram, minimums, screening and origin handling, each a cell, each repeated for every price break.

**Exchange rates by hand.** Five exchange rates, prime rate, finance and insurance factors keyed into the quote rather than read from the ERP.

**Margin at the bottom.** Mark-up factor, freight recovered and gross profit sat at the end of the column. Nothing recorded who approved the number.

**Local courier rates.** Domestic economy and express rates per kilogram, minimum weights and fuel surcharge held as cells inside the app. A rate change meant editing the app.

**Engineering and surcharges.** Engineering cost, mark-up and customer price, urgent surcharge, placeholder lines and minimum order value, one cell each on every line.

Behind the app

Fifty automation steps to raise a purchase order.

The Transfer Order Power Automate flow — **Before.** The "Transfer Order" Power Automate flow captured in production: fifty steps of variables, loops and conditions to turn one sales order into supplier purchase orders, reading its costs from Dataverse. Every pricing-rule change meant editing flows like this one.

The five Power Automate cloud flows — **The five flows.** Three pop-up flows for Business Central (add document line, split line, transfer order) and two versions of "Finalise Quote". All five were retired; the pop-up flows are the last to be switched off.

Cost-model changes moved from "edit the app and five flows" to "edit a template". Approval decisions are recorded against the quote instead of a role flag. The standard PCB template holds 211 cost items, each one a line the business can change itself.

What was replaced

Every Quote Builder component has a home.

Each piece of the Power Platform build was mapped to a part of the new platform before it was switched off. Nothing was left running without an owner.

01

Quote Builder canvas app

Now the RFQ module: creation, technical review, supplier pricing, pricing review, quote sent, customer decision and commercial review, each stage with an owner.

02

Quote header table (78 fields)

Now the RFQ and its line items. The PCB specification is pulled from the tech sheet instead of being re-typed.

03

Price-line table (133 fixed columns)

Now a supplier-by-item pricing matrix with one row per cost component. Adding a cost no longer needs a schema change.

04

Pricing rules inside app formulas

Now pricing templates: per-unit, fixed, percentage, formula and weight-based costs, maintained in the admin area. Lines that depend on other lines are ordered by a topological sort (Kahn's algorithm), so a markup is always calculated after the costs it marks up.

05

Freight rate-card table

Now air-freight and freight tables in the platform. Changing the mode of freight re-prices only the freight lines.

06

Exchange rate typed per quote

Now the FCIR or FEC rate is resolved automatically and synced from Business Central.

07

"Finalise Quote" flow (33 steps)

Now two platform actions: push pricing and create sales quote, with results and retries recorded on the RFQ.

08

"Transfer Order" flow (50 steps)

Now Create BC Orders from the post-sales board: the sales order plus per-vendor purchase orders in one step.

09

App access list and roles

Now Azure AD login with a permission matrix and configurable approval profiles. No per-user licence.

10

Opening old records to check a price

Now a History button on every pricing line, showing legacy and new quotes for the same part in one view.

After

How pricing works now: three moves.

01

Price against a template

The RFQ pulls the PCB spec from the tech sheet and opens a pricing grid for each invited supplier. Freight, duties, engineering, surcharges and markup are calculated by the platform, not typed. Dependent lines are resolved in order by a topological sort, so one input change recalculates only what depends on it.

02

Compare, select, approve

Suppliers sit side by side. One click shows what the same part was quoted at before. The chosen line goes through commercial review and the configured approval profile.

03

Write once to Business Central

The platform writes the price into Business Central's pricing tables and raises the sales quote itself, including engineering and urgent-surcharge lines, converting to rand where needed.

The RFQ pricing grid in production — **After.** The pricing grid in production (RFQ 6306): two suppliers side by side, totals, unit price, gross profit and engineering fee calculated live, supplier and commercial notes attached, and a History button on the line.

The nine-stage RFQ pipeline — **The pipeline.** Every quote moves through named stages with one owner each.

Pricing structure templates — **The cost model.** The standard PCB template holds 211 cost items. A rule change is an edit here.

Quote history for one part — **History on the line.** One click shows every past quote for the part, legacy and new, with customer, supplier and rate.

Implementation

Eight weeks, no pause in quoting.

Quote Builder stayed live until the new engine had been proven in the Business Central sandbox. Cut-over was a date, not a migration weekend.

Weeks 1–2
Pricing templates and RFQ pricing grid
Cost structure modelled as templates; supplier-by-item grid delivered on the platform.
Week 3
Calculation engine
Formula, percentage and weight-based costing; exchange-rate handling for USD and ZAR quotes. Cost lines form a dependency graph (markup on freight on unit cost), so the engine orders every calculation with Kahn's algorithm, a topological sort, and flags circular references in a template before they reach a quote.
Weeks 4–5
Full RFQ workflow and Business Central push
Nine-stage pipeline live; pricing pushed to the Business Central sandbox and verified; quote creation built and unblocked once BC permissions were granted.
Week 6
Commercial review and grid refinements
Approval flow simplified with the sales team; pricing grid tuned from daily use.
Week 7
Cut-over and history migration
Last Quote Builder quote finalised on cut-over day; all 8,338 quotes and 24,541 price lines loaded into the new platform.
Week 8
History in the grid
Historic pricing, customer purchase history and supplier benchmarking available from the pricing screen.

Lessons

What we learned.

Make the ERP the last write

Business Central now receives one clean price per quote instead of mirroring a changing record.

Check the live system, not the spec

The BC pricing table did not match its documentation. Querying it directly saved a wrong integration.

Keep history where people price

Old and new quotes appear in the same screen rather than an archive nobody opens.

Still to close

Retire the remaining BC pop-up flows that read Dataverse, then decommission the Power Platform environment.

Outgrown a Power App? Let's talk.

ScaleMind replaces low-code tools that have hit their ceiling with platforms your business owns.

gavin@scalemind.info