Manufacturing and assembly are a craft in their own right, and we might know. Especially if you work in small batches (make-to-stock) or build-to-order, a lot of complexity arises. Digitization is often more difficult in these cases, but it’s still absolutely worth doing. 4 good reasons to invest in a product configurator or CPQ solution in conjunction with your ERP.
1. Capture the knowledge of your top salesperson
Every company (hopefully) has someone like that on staff. A customer service representative or salesperson who not only knows all your products, options, and add-ons inside and out, but who also thinks along with the customer and truly offers solutions. He’s your top salesperson, but also almost half an engineer and a product specialist all rolled into one. You’d want to clone him!
Cloning isn't quite possible yet, but you can capture his knowledge in smart software. Work with him to analyze your most common product configurations, or take the opposite approach and list the assemblies that consistently cause exceptions. That way, you'll immediately help all the other employees in your company move forward.
You can take it a step further and manage this centrally in a product configurator. As a result, not only will your top salesperson spend less time on quotes and more time providing genuine advice, but their colleagues will also be able to easily create quotes on their own. And if the configurator is available online, your dealers or customers can get started right away!
2. Link your operations to your sales using CPQ
Every now and then, a production order probably rolls out of your workshop that doesn’t fully meet the customer’s expectations. Then you might have to make adjustments, remake it, or offer the customer a discount in the hope of selling it off… all energy you’d rather have spent elsewhere. The root cause of such costly mistakes sometimes lies right at the beginning of your order process—namely, in the quote! If you ensure that the input for your quote is 100% accurate from the start, your error rate will drop dramatically—and you can achieve this by linking your production and quoting processes through a so-called CPQ solution (Configure-Price-Quote-solution, for example Elfsquad).
Is this how you integrate a CPQ with your ERP or production software, you’ll also be able—as the icing on the cake—to better predict which raw materials, materials, services, machines, and subcontractors you’ll need in the future. That’s because a product configurator like this generates the underlying BOMs (bill of materials) for each quote directly from your ERP. This way, you’ll know right away exactly what you need to procure to ensure smooth production.
3. Free Your Engineers from Repetitive Work with a CPQ Configurator
Your engineers should be working on developing groundbreaking new products or making your solutions and processes even better. In reality, they’re probably spending more time answering sales questions, explaining to customers what’s standard and what’s custom, or processing CAD drawings.
Many of the manual tasks that engineering currently handles can be automated by creating your sales quote in a product configurator. That configurator It can control all the dimensions of your parametric models, allowing you to generate 3D CAD models very quickly.
You might be thinking, “This isn’t relevant to my company because we aren’t 100% % Built-To-Order.” Well, wouldn’t it be a huge time-saver if you could have those 60 % components from your solution—which is standardized—presented to you on a silver platter? And then have your engineer fill in that last bit? That way, your engineers will actually have time to work on that new super product with which you’re going to take the world by storm!
4. Give your marketing guys (and gals) the right tools
Your product can’t be explained to your customer in just a few simple steps. There are countless possibilities, countless options, and countless situations and contexts. And we know that things can sometimes get very complex—so much so that your customer almost always needs an advisor or specialist to fully grasp the potential of your solution.
That’s actually a major problem in this internet age, where we do everything online and where customers primarily want to find information on their own. They definitely don’t want a pushy salesperson (which yours certainly aren’t, of course); they want to serve themselves through your website. If you can’t offer that, your marketers will hit a wall, and you’ll miss out on leads.
Put all your complexity into an online configurator so your customers can explore your products on their own—and, more importantly, so your marketing team can follow up with those online leads to inform them about the solutions they expressed interest in.
What’s more, you don’t have to be a programmer or an IT whiz to incorporate all your knowledge and products into a product configurator or CPQ solution. Talk to us about it—we’d be happy to help you get started in the wonderful world of integrated product configurators that work seamlessly with common ERP solutions such as Dynamics 365 Business Central or Exact.On June 10, we organized a short Webinar on CPQ Product Configurators. In addition to demonstrations, a number of case studies and best practices will also be discussed.
