Revolutionize Your Manufacturing Operations With CPQ Software
Manufacturing challenges abound, rising costs, global competition, supply chain strains, and depleted workforces. But there’s a way to increase efficiency and stay ahead of the curve: CPQ software.
CPQ solutions automate product configuration and quoting, eliminating errors that can cost manufacturers business. With a robust rules engine, CPQ ensures configured products are profitable, manufacturable, and optimized for customer satisfaction.
Streamlined Sales Processes
With CPQ software, manufacturers can automate the entire sales process of generating and delivering quotes. This streamlines and enables more efficient workflows for all team members. The digitized product configuration process combines a user-friendly, interactive visual interface with the business’s technical specifications and pricing information to ensure accurate and complete quote creation. This eliminates the need for back-and-forth communication between teams and helps ensure that every proposed solution is feasible, profitable, and optimal for customer satisfaction. It also allows engineering to refocus on high-quality, innovative solutions for customers.
Moreover, CPQ software can help ensure that pricing structures are aligned with the company’s profit margin objectives and that the resulting quotes are competitive with those of the competition. This eliminates the need for manual calculations and resulting human errors, enabling sales staff to focus on nurturing leads and converting them into closed deals.
While several different CPQ systems are available on the market, not all are created equal. When selecting a system, look for a vendor with a robust and scalable architecture. Look for features like a unified product library, visual product configuration, and the ability to connect with other systems that are used in manufacturing processes. You will also want a vendor that provides excellent customer support and training opportunities and highly responds to customer feedback.
More Profitable Sales
CPQ technologies save time by automating repetitive, time-consuming procedures, allowing personnel to concentrate on more sophisticated, emotional customer-to-person interactions. Moreover, CPQ software for manufacturing is proven to increase sales and profits for businesses that invest in the technology. Some CPQ users have experienced four-fold profits growth over five years.
Sales teams can devote more time to selling and building customer relationships than navigating complex pricing and product settings. CPQ software eliminates human error in the quoting process and streamlines the entire sales process, allowing your team to deliver accurate quotes that meet customer expectations.
Unlike manual quoting processes that can result in miscalculations, inaccurate discounts, and other errors, CPQ software eliminates these pitfalls by leveraging rules-based quoting capabilities and pulling real-time inventory and pricing data from ERP systems. This ensures that the quotes you send customers are valid and adhere to engineering and manufacturing rules.
CPQ solutions also help your manufacturing business increase revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities. For example, a CPQ solution can be configured to display related products to the customers when they select options for their orders. This can result in greater average order values and higher profit margins for your company. A CPQ system can even automate the creation of detailed bills of materials (BOM) and deliver them to the engineering, production, finance, and procurement departments.
Better Customer Service
CPQ software is a powerful sales tool and can be used as a workflow system to progress orders to production schedules. This helps reduce order processing and shipment errors caused by product availability issues, incorrect pricing, or incompatibility between components.
Moreover, CPQ can help you create a better customer buying experience with its automated quoting process, ensuring accurate and personalized pricing. It can be integrated with a visual configurator to give buyers a real-time 3D model of the product they purchased. This helps to minimize canceled orders and miscommunications due to inaccurate dimension specifications.
In addition, CPQ can be connected to your ERP and CRM systems to provide a single source of truth for all pricing information. It enables your teams to avoid expensive and time-consuming manual processes that can lead to inaccurate data and inconsistencies between quotes.
As economic uncertainty continues to pressure the global manufacturing industry, you need to find ways to improve your sales process efficiency. A CPQ solution is an excellent way to improve customer service, reduce margin pressure, and increase sales revenue opportunities.
Increased Productivity
CPQ software eliminates manual processes and automates quote generation to increase productivity. The tool can be easily integrated with business systems such as CRM, ERP, CAD, and e-commerce platforms to streamline the end-to-end sales process from lead management to contract management, billing, and order renewal. A cloud-based CPQ solution offers access anywhere and anytime and seamless scalability to support growth.
Personalized, professional-looking quotes can be generated in minutes and hours without human intervention. This allows sales reps and channel partners to perform like pros and reduce the time required to reach quota targets. Enhanced accuracy and speed also improve the customer experience as buyers can build, visualize, and place orders independently without waiting for quotes or speaking to a rep.
Using a CPQ solution to automate pricing and quotes can differentiate profit maximization and loss. CPQ rules can determine prices in real time based on factors such as BOM characteristics, production costs, optional features, and customer sensitivity. This automation removes the need for manual calculation and eliminates errors. Moreover, a CPQ system with built-in integrations and a robust rules engine saves your team work hours by eliminating the need to update SQL databases and spreadsheets with price changes manually. As a result, your team can be more effective, efficient, and profitable.