QDV, optimal pricing software for electricity

The number of disciplines or specialties in electricity is large and the needs in terms of costing are very varied.

Between equipment manufacturers ( Schneider Electric , Socomec ), cabinet manufacturers ( Soreel , RC3I , Bossard), control and supervision specialists, suppliers of low current solutions: video surveillance ( Nexecur ), home automation ( Delta Dore ) or strong current, some companies are hyper-specialized in a sector while others are multidisciplinary (Monnier).

Furthermore, as in many construction sectors, companies in the electricity sector can range from one-person businesses to CAC40 companies with all possible and imaginable intermediate sizes.

It is therefore not easy to navigate the encryption solutions offered for this sector of activity. In the case of a very specialized small business in installations, a vertical solution like ESABORA offered by REXEL will do the job. A company in the same specialty, but with 10 to 50 employees, can turn to the Optima encryption solution supplemented by the Mercure commercial management solution.

At the time of choice, the company will have to think about opening its encryption tool, because certain publishers offering complementary solutions to encryption will not easily open their tool in order to provide you with their complementary solutions as a priority: CRM, ERP , configurators or even databases. If the encryption functionalities do not suit you, be sure that the other functionalities are up to par, because you cannot be efficient on all fronts.

You must therefore weigh the pros and cons of an open or closed tool, because you know today what your specialties are, but what about those of tomorrow? You will perhaps, through external growth, develop into complementary professions which will be very poorly managed in certain tools. Hence the importance of choosing a tool that is efficient, but also versatile.

The universality of QDV for the electricity sector.

It is not for nothing that QDV was developed by Cegelec ciphers in the early 1990s. It is also not by chance that in 1995 SPIE decided to equip itself and has since generalized the use of QDV on all its subsidiaries in France and around the world.

The use of price libraries and configurators.

For a large number of installers, the costing tool is of little importance, the coster could just as easily cost in Excel if it were not for the problem of updating component prices in an area very dependent on price fluctuations that we are particularly familiar with during this period.

In fact, some manufacturers do not even commit to a 15-day price due in particular to the price of copper and it is necessary to constantly consult distributors or manufacturers. When the time comes to report these prices in an Excel spreadsheet, it becomes dangerous, because you cannot easily find the item in all the costed items.

In QDV via the nomenclature tab, it is possible to update the price of an item throughout the quote with a single entry. It is also possible to export the nomenclature, transmit it to suppliers and re-enter it to update all prices.

Time saved and precision are there!

The price of the components is good, but the technique in all that?

The technique is not left out since in addition to the price library, QDV allows the use of books or configurators such as Elec-id. Developed by tertiary experts, Elec-id contains more than 5,000 configurators which make it possible to respect business rules, and thus quickly encrypt from an anti-intrusion system to a transformer via cable trays or sick calls in a hospital.

If you are familiar with the BATIPRIX databases, you can also find them in QDV thanks to our partnership with the publisher of these databases which are used in particular for public calls for tenders.

Don't panic if you work in another sector, because you can develop your own configurators using business logic.

Can we go even further into technology?

It's entirely possible. As you can personalize the calculation of your cost prices, you can also enrich your databases with technical elements such as the number of inputs or outputs on each piece of equipment, or even the power of the motors.

Thus, you easily obtain in your encryption a power balance or the total numbers of inputs and outputs. Some calculate their service by multiplying these values by a coefficient depending on the difficulty of a project.

This very technical approach can coexist in QDV with a more traditional approach to calculating the cost price and the selling price.

Sizing tools like XL Pro from Legrand or Rhapsody from Schneider Electric are QDV partner software, meaning you can extract files that can be integrated directly into QDV.

How does QDV position itself on public markets in the electricity sector.

For companies responding to public markets, one of the entry points is the integration into QDV of the DPGF and the BPU in order to complete it directly without having to carry forward the results of the sales price calculations.

For BPUs, we can transform the costing into a market basis in order to ensure the consistency of sales prices while controlling the margins over the duration of the market.

Finally, on very specific markets such as the ENEDIS or SNCF markets, it is possible to quantify the services to the point. We calculate a point price per municipality, for example, the service corresponding to a certain number of points.