"We engaged Marlabs to support a bid and negotiation platform initiative where we needed a more scalable and innovative way to capture and operationalize bid and negotiation data. As a Product Manager, I valued Marlabs as a true solution partner—they consistently looked beyond the immediate requirements and collaborated with us to design a complete, forward‑looking solution. The project leveraged Salesforce Sales Cloud, the Valorx Fusion add‑on, and custom-built components tailored to our business needs. What set Marlabs apart was their creativity and willingness to problem-solve alongside our team, rather than simply delivering exactly what was requested. Their expertise helped us build a novel solution that drove full user adoption. As a result, we are now capturing 100% of bid volume throughout the entire negotiation cycle. A helpful tip for others considering Marlabs: bring them into the problem early, clearly share your challenges, and give them the space to collaborate—they excel when trusted to co‑create the solution."
-Client Product Manager

Summary

This client is a publicly traded food and oil business powerhouse that plays a pivotal role in connecting farmers to consumers through its integrated operations in food, feed, and fuel. The SAP-based quoting and contracting process was slow and fragmented, with multiple system dependencies causing delays and users struggling to configure different quote and contract types, leading to inconsistencies and low confidence in the process.

Marlabs designed and implemented a unified Salesforce platform that streamlined quoting and contracting into a single interface, integrating with SAP and SharePoint to automate workflows, ensure pricing accuracy, and enable quote-to-contract conversion. The solution drove full user adoption and now captures 100% of bid volume throughout the entire negotiation cycle.

Challenge

The SAP-based quoting and contracting process was slow and fragmented, with multiple dependencies causing delays and inefficiencies. The absence of a single view and effective price tracking led to inconsistencies and low confidence in the process.

The objective was to streamline and automate the end-to-end quoting and contracting process by building a unified Salesforce-based application integrated with SAP and SharePoint, enabling efficient quote creation, pricing accuracy, contract generation, and analytics-driven decision-making. The quoting process was slow and fragmented across multiple teams and systems, with no single view of customer quotes and no way to effectively track pricing offered against guidance from the pricing engine. Without a reliable mechanism to compare offered pricing against internal guidance, the sales team lacked the controls needed to act with confidence or consistency across negotiations.

Solution

Marlabs designed and implemented a unified Salesforce platform that streamlined quoting and contracting into a single interface, reducing delays. Automated workflows and SAP pricing integration ensured accuracy, consistency, and compliance, while sales teams gained full visibility with quote tracking, pricing analytics, and faster quote-to-contract conversion. Rather than addressing only the immediate requirements, the team collaborated closely with the client to architect a complete, forward-looking solution that would serve the organization at scale.

Quote creation & configuration

We built a unified interface on Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud for the client to create, configure, and convert quotes, supporting standard, price mail, multi-quote, and blend quote types tailored to their business needs. The platform consolidated what had previously been a fragmented, multi-system process into a single, coherent workflow that sales teams could navigate with confidence. By supporting multiple quote types within a single application, the solution eliminated the inconsistencies that had undermined user trust in the previous process and gave the team a reliable foundation for every customer engagement.

Pricing & freight integration

The team integrated SAP and CME systems for real-time pricing and connected SharePoint for freight and SAP for rail freight to enable complex price calculations and streamlined logistics cost estimation. This integration gave sales teams access to accurate, up-to-date pricing guidance directly within Salesforce, removing the need to move between systems and reducing the risk of errors caused by manual data handling. With pricing guidance and freight costs surfaced in a single interface, the team gained the controls needed to track offered pricing against internal benchmarks and make consistent, defensible decisions throughout the negotiation process.

Contracting & submission

Marlabs enabled creation of multiple contract types — flat, HTA, basis, and delivered basis — and automated submission to SAP with PDF output generation and dynamic and standard quote output templates. The automated submission workflow eliminated manual re-entry of contract data into SAP, reducing the time between agreement and formal contract execution and lowering the risk of transcription errors. Configurable output templates ensured that documentation was consistent and professional across all contract types, giving both the sales team and their customers a reliable, standardized experience at every stage of the contracting process.

Analytics & workflow automation

Our team implemented PLM workflows in Salesforce to manage product lifecycle and quoting processes, set up alerts for gross profit thresholds and market swing checks to ensure pricing integrity, and built analytics dashboards to track quote revisions and negotiation trends. The gross profit and market swing alerts gave leadership a real-time mechanism to monitor pricing decisions and intervene when quotes drifted outside acceptable parameters, strengthening governance across the sales organization. The analytics dashboards transformed raw quoting activity into actionable intelligence, enabling the team to identify patterns in negotiation behavior, measure the effectiveness of pricing strategies, and make more informed decisions over time.

Results

A unified sales platform streamlines quote creation and contract generation, supported by pricing analytics for better guidance adherence. Standardized processes enhance turnaround speed, driving higher sales productivity and revenue growth, and the solution now captures 100% of bid volume throughout the entire negotiation cycle. The engagement demonstrated that bringing a solution partner in early and giving them the space to collaborate produces outcomes that a traditional requirements-delivery model cannot match.

Impact

• Faster quote processing: The client now benefits from a unified platform for quote and contract generation that eliminates the delays caused by fragmented, multi-system dependencies.
• Improved pricing accuracy: Analytics supporting price guidance adherence replaced a process in which pricing offered could not be effectively tracked against guidance from the pricing engine.
• Standardized quoting process: A consistent, repeatable quoting process enables quicker turnaround and reduced errors across multiple teams and quote types.
• Enhanced operational efficiency: Streamlined sales workflows replaced a slow, fragmented process that spanned multiple teams and systems with no single view of customer quotes.
• Increased sales productivity: Reduced manual effort and better tools freed the sales team to focus on higher-value activity, driving measurable gains in productivity.
• Growth in sales revenue: Faster response times, optimized pricing, and full capture of 100% of bid volume throughout the negotiation cycle support sustained revenue growth.