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The End of the Idea-to-Cash Journey

If you’ve successfully brought a product to market, you’ve already overcome several concept and production challenges. However, the journey is far from over. In part one of our idea-to-cash journey series, we covered product design challenges and how product lifecycle management (PLM) software can help you manage the entire process. Part two highlighted the challenges of cross-functional collaboration for production. In the final chapter of our idea-to-cash series, we will cover the obstacles of building an efficient sales process and the software needed to overcome them.

Sales: The End of the Idea-to-Cash Journey

After designing and refining a product with other company stakeholders, it’s time to generate sales to recoup your investment. However, the sales process for customizable products like heavy machinery, fluid handling equipment, and other industrial solutions, is more complex than simple, off-the-shelf products. That’s because customers need help identifying and configuring products to meet their needs — and sales needs to facilitate this quickly or risk losing business.

Here’s what to watch out for in this leg of the journey:

  • Pricing and Quoting Errors. Every single variable in a configurable product — from the type of a valve to the capacity of the power supply — can dramatically alter both its performance and price. Using spreadsheets, homegrown configurators, or even handwritten calculations leaves room for typos and other human errors. When sales is also required to manually write out quote documents, the potential for error increases further. Any mistakes could result in lost revenue or a damaged reputation.
  • Communication Bottlenecks. With so many variables to consider in configurations, it’s important to run product builds by engineering for sign-off to ensure a design is viable. Otherwise, manufacturers could risk going all the way through production on a custom product only to find out it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, engineers are often busy, so it can take a long time to respond to a sales query, becoming a bottleneck in the entire process. Not only would this reflect negatively on the company, but it would be a waste of valuable time and resources.
  • Long Sales Cycle Time. Because of the many moving parts in generating a quote, a sale can take days or weeks to close. Every interaction between customers and sales and sales and engineering causes delays over time. The lag time for each sale during the year can greatly impact annual revenue.

Tools for the Journey

Specialty manufacturers can’t rely on spreadsheets anymore to handle their configurations — they need configure, price, quote (CPQ) software. In part one of this series, we discussed how CPQ can help engineers automate configurability during the design phase, but the technology also has a customer-facing side. Here’s how it works:

  • Engineers build a back-end catalog on the software that features products, configuration options, prices, and rules that dictate how variables can be combined.
  • Users can publish an online portal that allows customers to select products from the catalog, the configurations they need, and automatically request a quote. Conditional logic will prevent them from making selections not allowed by the manufacturer, and all pricing is automatically calculated.
  • Once complete, many CPQ platforms can auto-generate a quote document and submit it to the customer for review. All that’s left is to close the deal.

PLM remains useful throughout the sales process as well. The software can integrate directly with the CPQ platform to automatically update inventory. If a particular quote does require feedback from engineers, the sales team can facilitate and document the communication through the PLM. All of the sales data the PLM collects from CPQ could inform future product development decisions. For example, if a particular configuration proves to be especially popular, designers may consider creating it as an off-the-shelf solution and reach a bigger market.

Revalize offers an entire suite of solutions that can aid manufacturers throughout every stage of the idea-to-cash journey. Users can choose to leverage PLM, computer-aided design (CAD), CPQ, and other solutions independently to refine specific parts of their operation, or combine them as a complete end-to-end platform.

Schedule a product demo to see what our technology can do for you. Or, read our PLM roadmap to learn more.

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