One custom-built platform for quoting, ordering and site management at Despraz
How a Swiss industrial piping family business replaced a patchwork of off-the-shelf tools with a custom-built platform, in two phases.
Sector
Energy & utilities.
Footprint
Granges-Marnand, Vaud, Switzerland.
Scale
Projects from small installations to very large industrial sites (food, pharma, biotech, incineration).
Dynapps partner
Since 2020.
Backing
Family-owned. Despraz Holding SA, founded 1988 by Jean-Daniel Despraz.
Before Dynapps stepped in.
By late 2020, Despraz SA was 32 years old and growing faster than its software could keep up with. The company designs, prefabricates and installs industrial piping and thermal systems from its workshop in Granges-Marnand, in the Broye vaudoise. Jean-Daniel Despraz had founded the business in 1988, and the next generation was now in the room: Rachel Catellani, his daughter, on the management team as responsable administrative, and her brother Mathieu Despraz on the board. Underneath the growth was a quiet problem. The off-the-shelf software the company had been running on no longer matched how Despraz actually worked: quotes, order confirmations, supplier records, customer histories and the engineering office sat in different places. Rachel could see the gap widening. The choice was approaching: keep patching, or build something that fit the business.
The challenge
Where the cracks showed.
Two project managers, two quotes
Without a shared rate base, two project managers pricing similar work could land on noticeably different numbers. Times and prices lived in each project manager's head and in their own spreadsheets. Manuel Gürner, a project manager for four years, said the spread on identical work was real, not theoretical.
Quote prep on Excel, prices by hand
When Manuel had a large offer to prepare in Excel, he would open the old tool just to pull prices and labour times across, line by line. The data lived in one place but the work happened in another.
Double entry across the back office
The same customer, supplier or product reference was typed into more than one system across the technical office, secretariat, accounting and logistics. Each re-entry was a chance for the data to drift.
Why Despraz chose a custom-built platform over off-the-shelf software.
At the end of 2020, the question stopped being whether to replace the existing tools and started being how. Rachel led the analysis on the Despraz side, and the team went through their needs and processes in detail before anyone touched software. The conclusion: an off-the-shelf product would not cover how Despraz actually worked. Despraz needed something built around it.
Three things shaped the choice:
Custom over off-the-shelf
Standard products did not match the way Despraz quoted, fabricated and installed. Customising any of them deep enough to fit would have created an unmaintainable patchwork.
Web-based, not on-premise.
A web platform meant no on-site servers to maintain and no backups to run, so the Despraz team could keep its energy on the business rather than on infrastructure.
A partner in Switzerland, directly reachable.
The Despraz team wanted direct contact with the people building the platform, in the same country and language. Dynapps sat in Bulle, a short drive across the canton.
How the rollout really happened
How Despraz built its custom platform in two phases.
2020
The partnership with Dynapps begins with a kickoff, a needs analysis and priority-setting on the Despraz side.
2022
The custom platform goes live for product, customer, supplier and engineering-office master data, and puts quotes, order confirmation and the administrative management of construction sites into production.
2025
Work starts on hours tracking, absence management, supplier invoices and customer invoicing.
2026
The platform goes live across the full lifecycle of a construction site, from quote to closeout, on a single system.
What Dynapps built for Despraz: one rate base, quote to closeout.
Dynapps Switzerland built custom business software that owns Despraz's shared data and the workflows on it. The point is one rate base: every project manager quotes from the same prices and labour times, with article numbers resolving in one keystroke. Live since 2022: master data, quotes, order confirmation, site administration. Live since February 2026: hours, absences, supplier and customer invoicing, site planning. The platform now covers a site from quote to closeout. Roughly 80 weeks from kickoff to first go-live, with two Dynapps developers and four Despraz key users.
Modules: master data (products, customers, suppliers, engineering office), quote generation, order confirmation, site administration, hours & absence tracking, supplier invoices, customer invoicing, site planning.
The discipline throughout.
Build around the priorities the customer sets first, then expand in phases. Despraz’s first task with Dynapps was prioritising, not specifying: where to start, what could wait. The platform grew from that order.
The hardest part was the customer’s time, not the build.
The hardest part was time, on the customer side. Rachel says it plainly: the main challenge was the time she personally had to put into the development and rollout while still running her day job.
Building a tailored platform is not a procurement exercise that can be delegated. Someone on the customer side has to decide what the business actually does, in what order, with what trade-offs. That work is unglamorous and it competes with everything else on the agenda. Manuel adds the field version of the same problem: the team had ‘la tête dans le guidon,’ nose to the handlebars, easily skipping the upstream thinking. He flags it as the single thing future projects should not under-budget.
Adoption inside the company was the other friction point, smaller but real. Rachel notes a transition period that was ‘délicate’ for some colleagues. Overall acceptance came, but not on day one.
This solution changed the way we work. It brought a real discipline into our work and our records.
Rachel Catellani
Responsable administrative, Despraz SAThe numbers
By 2026, one custom platform runs Despraz from quote to closeout.
The patchwork of off-the-shelf tools and personal spreadsheets is gone. One custom-built platform owns the shared master data and the single rate base every project manager quotes from, and since phase 2 went live in February 2026 it carries hours, absences, supplier invoices and customer invoicing too. The full lifecycle of a construction site, from quote to closeout, now runs in one place.
3,339
construction sites managed in the platform.
1,396
clients and suppliers in the shared master data.
75
quotes generated from the platform, January to May 2026.
80
weeks from phase-1 kickoff (end of 2020) to phase-1 go-live (2022).
From 'whose Excel do I copy?' to 'where is the article number?'
When the next project manager starts at Despraz, the question is no longer 'whose Excel do I copy?' It is 'where is the article number?' The platform turned implicit knowledge that lived in individual heads and individual spreadsheets into a shared baseline the whole company quotes, orders and bills against. That shift, from each project manager running their own version of the business to all of them running the same one, is what the platform set out to do. Since February 2026, the same logic reaches from the front office into time, absence and invoicing.
If this sounds familiar, let’s talk.
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