CRM tool drastically reduces quote time

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Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Published : 11 Jul 2002 9:55

The complex nature of American Power Conversion’s PowerStruXure solution means that without an automation tool, quotes to customers can take several weeks.

Using Cincom’s Knowledge Builder, APC’s sales team is able to produce such a quote in a matter of minutes, said Soren Brogaard Jensen, CTO/E-Business Development Manager.

APC is a $1.4 billion maker of power protection and environmental control systems with headquarters in West Kingston, RI and a development facility in Kolding, Denmark, where Jensen is currently based. The PowerStruXure products, which are sold worldwide, are made up of 50 to 100 parts on average. The parts are compiled into subassemblies that are custom combined for each purchaser.

Using Knowledge Builder, part of Cincom’s CRM for Complex Manufacturers suite, Jensen’s team began building a configurator for its new line of power systems to coincide with the release of the product. The configurator allows APC salespeople to capture the customer’s requirements, match those requirements with the company’s product offerings, and quickly offer a solution that meets the customer’s needs. “The configurator takes requirements and generates a solution with items, descriptions, prices—a detailed proposal,” said Jensen. The system also supplies the total weight of the system and details on production, installation, and maintenance.

According to Jensen, the automated configurator not only increases the quality of the quotes, guiding salespeople to the best product to suit the customer’s need, it also allows for much more efficient cross selling and upselling. “They can sell the whole suite of products in this area of business—which involves multiple product lines,” he said.

The configurator also affects time to market, said Jensen, explaining that the new product could not have been rolled out nearly as fast without it. “Because of the amount of training and support required, we would not have had the resources internally to support a rollout like this if we didn’t have a tool that could automate some of it,” he said.

The end-game for APC is to eliminate engineer-to-order, said Jensen. “We want to get away from having our engineers manually configuring every order. Engineer-to-order is very time consuming and expensive. You have highly educated people sitting and putting all the pieces together. It increases cost and delivery cycle time, the turnaround time is much longer than if you have everything automated, and you know the variants and what kind of options you want to offer.”