Duport brings clarity and control with Merkato

Duport brings clarity and control to sales with Merkato

We spoke with Herjan Ritsema, Operations Manager at Duport, about the challenges that came with growth, complexity and knowledge transfer – and how Merkato became an essential part of the solution.

From engineering to sales coordination

Herjan started his career at Duport as an engineer. Together with one colleague, he was responsible for preparing machines for production – including creating the bill of materials (BOMs). “At the time, that process was still in its infancy,” he recalls.

As Duport grew, Herjan’s role gradually shifted toward internal sales support. Thanks to his strong product knowledge and BOM experience, he became the crucial link between sales and production.

Growth and complexity brought new challenges

International expansion opened up new markets for Duport – but also introduced several operational challenges:

• BOM management: As product complexity increased, managing everything in Excel became unworkable. Herjan created price lists manually, but the growing number of variations and combinations led to configuration errors and unbuildable orders.

• Knowledge transfer: With new sales reps joining abroad, the lack of in-depth product knowledge led to incorrect orders and long onboarding processes.

• Efficient order intake: Duport needed a reliable way to prevent technically invalid configurations from being sold, as fixing them later in production was costly and time-consuming.

Choosing Merkato

To address these issues, Duport started looking for a solution – and found it in Merkato, the no-code CPQ platform from Merkato Group.

“Building configurators in Merkato is surprisingly easy. Even without a software background, we were up and running after just two days of training,” says Herjan.

Using their in-house product knowledge and BOM expertise, Herjan and his team built the core of their configurator themselves. Regular meet-ups at Merkato Group’s office in Apeldoorn allowed for focused work sessions and direct access to consultants for quick support.

Sales becomes faster, cleaner, and smarter

Since implementing Merkato, Duport has seen clear improvements across the board:

• Clean order intake: “Errors caused by unbuildable configurations are a thing of the past.” Customers now only receive technically valid quotes, boosting satisfaction and reliability.

• Efficiency and time savings: Sales reps can create quotes much faster, while engineers gain back valuable time for innovation instead of fixing mistakes.

• Streamlined production: The configurator guides sales reps toward tailored standard solutions, improving productivity on the shop floor.

• Automation ambitions: Duport is currently working on an API connection between Merkato and its ERP system (Powerall) to fully automate order processing.

Ambitious plans for the future

Duport sees Merkato as a long-term strategic tool and is planning further rollouts:

• Full automation: The ultimate goal is to automatically convert configurations into production orders – without any manual engineering work.

• Deployment to external sales reps: Merkato is currently rolled out internally, but the next step is to equip external sales teams as well.

• Ongoing optimisation: “You’re never really done with a configurator,” Herjan notes. And he’s right: configurators evolve with the business.

Advice to other manufacturers

For other companies producing complex machines in series, Herjan offers a clear recommendation:

“If you have a complex product and want to produce it in series, a configurator can really help you achieve that.”

A solid foundation for the future

Herjan looks back on the collaboration with Merkato Group with satisfaction. “We could always reach out with questions, and that gave us confidence.” Now that he is leaving Duport, he passes the configurator project to his colleagues knowing the foundation is strong and future-proof.