How Configure, Price, Quote Solutions Solve Manufacturing Challenges

In the not-so-distant past, specializing in one or two products – and then hammering out thousands of them as quickly as possible – was the standard operating procedure for any successful manufacturer. Thanks to new technologies, mass-produced items were finally feasible and affordable for everyone.

These days, customers aren’t so easily impressed.

Research shows that at least 63 percent of customers expect personalization as a standard feature – whether that’s in the shopping experience, or in the final product itself. In response, brands have reoriented themselves to offer as much customization as possible.

But for companies with complex items, customization presents its own challenges for the sales cycle and manufacturing processes.

If you’re facing challenges related to either of these things, this one’s for you. Here’s how configure, price, quote software can support your goal of producing customized products at scale.

What Is Configure Price Quote (CPQ)?

Configure Price Quote solutions empower companies to offer customized products by providing them with a means to collect and process customization requests quickly, with fewer errors.

As the name implies, there are three parts to all good CPQ solutions:

Configuration. This may take the form of either a customer-facing 2D or 3D visual configurator, or an internal configuration interface for your sales team.
Pricing. Real-time pricing that automatically updates as users select different options keeps things transparent and efficient.
Quoting. Once all options are configured, many solutions can generate and approve quotes automatically, delivering the final estimate to the customer’s email.

That might all sound arcane, but these solutions appear regularly in ecommerce. If you’ve ever played with an interface on a website that lets you “design” a product by changing its color, materials, size, or similar characteristics, then you’ve interacted with the public-facing tip of CPQ software.

5 Challenges Configure Price Quote Software Can Solve

Getting to design your own shoes or build your own custom garage is fun from a consumer perspective, but for a business, it can be a nightmare.

From guaranteeing the availability of materials to keeping the details straight as the order moves through the business, here are five challenges that companies can overcome with Configure, Price, and Quote software.

1. Lengthy Sales Cycles

Customization used to be reserved for high-end products. That’s because it required customers to collaborate with a sales rep and communicate exactly what they wanted. While it’s largely obsolete (except in the case of certain, white-glove retailers), this process still routinely surfaces with complex products like machinery or biotech devices.

It also means that the sales cycle slows to a crawl, potentially putting months between first contact and product delivery.

A solid CPQ solution can help with this, shortening your cycle from multiple weeks to under an hour. (Here’s how Merck did it.)

Rather than relying on humans to take care of everything, CPQ can:

Automate rote tasks. Whether it’s quote approval or invoicing, many good CPQ solutions rely on automation to handle repetitive tasks, so that your sales team can spend more time working with clients rather than paperwork.
Streamline scheduling. Keep your schedule on track by never missing client meetings or manufacturing deadlines, and by keeping the right team members in the loop with developments.
Generate schematics for manufacturing. A good solution can take what your customers input and turn them into orders that your manufacturers can understand – without you ever lifting a finger.

2. Training Staff

Hiring and training staff is expensive. Research shows that small companies (under 1,000 employees) have invested an average of 49 hours of training per year in each employee since 2017. Likewise, the cost of replacing a single employee stands at around 21 percent of their annual salary.

But when you’ve got unique processes that can’t easily be learned elsewhere, training and replacing staff becomes even more inconvenient (and expensive.)

A CPQ solution can help with this. By reducing the learning curve associated with your customization processes, your team can get to work more quickly, with less frustration. Likewise, rather than inundating new hires with confusing documentation, it can:

Reduce the learning curve with intuitive interfaces and visual controls.
Make answers readily available with knowledge bases and tech support.
Simplify tasks with automation and easy input requirements.

3. Process Bottlenecks

Does your sales team seem to get stuck at the same steps? Do customers consistently vanish at a certain point in the sales cycle?

Those are both good signs you’ve got a bottleneck in your sales process. Bottlenecks occur when information or orders get stuck at specific places in the cycle because there aren’t enough resources to handle them. One common example we’ve found happens when your office relies on one or a few people to manually approve quotes. Bottlenecks also frequently happen during:

Document processes, such as proposal creation
CAD drawing or the product design phase
Product configuration, when conducted by sales reps

CPQ software can help with this by automating many of these tasks. Likewise, it can also help keep information from becoming siloed in one team by making it available via the platform. That means your sales reps always have what they need, when and where they need it.

4. Complicated Implementation

CPQ solutions are powerful, but we’ve found that they’re not always super-easy to implement. The complicated implementation sometimes required can turn businesses off to using them altogether.

Your preferred solution shouldn’t require you to rip and replace your existing business infrastructure.

Fortunately, it’s become much more common for CPQ solutions to work with existing ecosystems rather than demanding that companies operate solely within their software. Some signs that you’re looking at a good solution include:

Integration with major CRMs and ERPs, including Salesforce and SAP.
The ability to work with multiple file types, especially CAD files.
Options to export files into different systems or create files that are compatible with outside systems.

5. Legacy Processes

Last but certainly not least, companies that offer customization can quickly find themselves hamstrung if their business processes still occur manually.

Many people assume that legacy processes – typically manual tasks – only exist when paper is involved. For example, physical invoices or order forms that must be entered into a computer by hand constitute legacy processes.

That’s not always true. Legacy processes can occur in digital form whenever you’re using a tool that requires manual attention. One of the most common places we find legacy processes lies in companies still using Excel sheets to track their components for configuration.

Legacy processes are a problem because they create more work, introduce more opportunities for errors, and keep your information ecosystem fractured. In contrast, a CPQ solution automates many of these tasks, eliminating time use and errors, while keeping everything available and up to date.

Are your sales teams still doing things by hand? Get CPQ software and give them a break.

Bottom Line: Configure, Price, Quote Solutions Should Solve Challenges, Not Create Them.

If you plan on offering customized products, you need a solution that can help you configure, price, and quote them. Otherwise, you’re fighting an uphill battle against manual processes and potentially complicated implementation that hampers your ability to give customers exactly what they want.

We’ve looked at five of the most common challenges that CPQ solutions can solve. With this handy software, your team and your customers will have what they need to offer customized offerings quickly and efficiently.

Don’t wait until you hit a bottleneck. Start out with your best foot forward and seize that competitive advantage.