These days, even in the B2B world the demand for customization and a compelling user experience is growing for sophisticated, highly configurable products. Sales reps face more pressure to produce winning quotes faster and more profitably. At the same time, the different applications that need to communicate with each other to optimize sales enablement have, quite frankly, made integration issues a major headache for IT departments. So, uniting back-office with front-office processes is more crucial than ever.
For decades, we’ve been helping companies sell custom products and variants using simple, smart tools for configuration and guided selling that streamline processes within the larger lead-to-cash process. But we’re also determined to ease integration pain.
That’s why we’re offering an enhanced version of our innovative configure-price-quote (CPQ) tools to our SAP® enterprise users, right out of the box. As the world’s leading provider of business software solutions, SAP helps hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the world manufacture and deliver configurable products. And as an SAP partner, Tacton can leverage the product data and configuration rules from SAP ERP and SAP Variant Configurator (VC) to deliver accurate, up-to-date pricing, bundling and product configuration information to sales teams, partners and end customers.
Seamless and structured, or still in silos?
For many businesses, the processes, tools, and expertise they need to optimize lead-to-cash are still stuck in silos. Information simply doesn’t flow smoothly from one business function to another. And there is no single “record of truth.”
With Tacton’s configuration and needs-based selling solutions for SAP, users can configure complex products quickly and accurately using up‑to‑date, authoritative master and transaction data from SAP ERP. SAP remains the system of record where the data is maintained. Tacton makes that data easily available for sales configurations and automatically synchronizes the configuration results with quotes and orders in SAP. This way, companies can rest assured that their sales teams and partners quote products that are actually buildable and optimally priced and sold.
Goodbye custom code and chatty calls – hello peace of mind!
IT administrators can spend 100% of their working hours transferring data on materials, BOMs, pricing, and more from SAP to CPQ. Resource-inefficient implementations require custom code developed by programmers to convert extracted data into formats that can be imported to the CPQ tool. As a result, any changes an SAP administrator makes will probably require additional maintenance (at a high cost, of course).
Also, typical integrations use direct BAPI calls to request and return pricing data from SAP ERP. Any changes made by a salesperson will lead to many frequent “chatty” calls in real time that lower network performance.
Tacton automatically extracts and translates SAP VC models to Tacton models on a frequent, scheduled basis, eliminating these problems.
How it works: The lead-to-cash flow
Here’s how it works from the business user’s point of view. Product inventory, capacity, and available-to-promise from SAP ERP are made available to the quoting screens in your CPQ tool. After this is done, your opportunities and quotes are created in CPQ and pushed to SAP sales order management. Finally, to complete the order-to-cash process, you process and ship your orders, invoice them and collect payments within SAP. The entire process is completed when inventory is updated and made available to the CPQ tool for the next quoting cycle.
It’s a seamless, highly automated end-to-end process – one that users experience as taking place within the same system. No need to jump from application to application, no risk of double maintenance, no manual errors.
Main benefits of Tacton configuration tools for SAP
Slash data administration overhead
- Eradicate redundant processes and double maintenance by automating data sync
Reduce manual errors
- Automated data transfer eradicates manual manipulation
- Reduce the reliance on technical experts in the sales process
Increase order accuracy
- Quote and place orders with correct configuration data and precision pricing
- Full connection between articles in quotes and materials in SAP (SBOM > MBOM)
Optimize the manufacturing process
- Drive production planning/MRP from the sales order
- Automatically build production forecasting on proposal and order data
- Secure an understanding of available-to-promise, capacity and lead time
Lower your implementation costs
- Faster implementations by leveraging existing data and models
Why not test Tacton CPQ on your organization’s SAP data? Download a demo version and contact us today to get started.