It’s time, you’ve finally convinced the higher-ups in your company to make your work and life a little easier by purchasing a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution. That was the seemingly difficult part, but without proper planning and thought your CPQ implementation can experience early growing pains or fail completely.
To avoid this and keep the ball rolling on digitally transforming your manufacturing operation it’s important to plan accordingly for both success and failure. Here are a few ways to set your team up for a successful CPQ project.
Set must-needs early
Before you can start your project it’s important to align from the top of the organization to the bottom. How will CPQ effect sales, engineering and even marketing? Without asking these questions your project can become doomed before you even purchase a single license.
Engaging with your key stakeholders will help the project run smoothly and eliminate silos that have built up over time. Another business-critical question to ask is how does the CPQ integrate with your current system? Does CPQ offer integrations to Dynamics, Salesforce or SAP? It’s important to be able to ask these questions early and often to pick the right CPQ. Now that you’ve figured out the must-needs for a CPQ project it’s important to consider what part of CPQ is important for your business.
Define what part of CPQ is most important to your business
Is configuring more important than pricing to your operation? Do you want visual configuration to be a part of your sales pitch? These questions are unique to your business. Some will want to focus more on helping your engineering configure 100% correct products, while others will want to blow the doors off competition with a one-of-a-kind visual of their unique product. Answering these questions will help you narrow down the KPI’s you want to use in your success metrics.
Create KPI’s to measure success
Now that you’ve considered all your must-needs and aligned with different departments it’s time to focus on KPI’s to measure the success of your investment. Those determinations will come from what you think is most important to your business initiatives. Here are some examples our customers used to measure their success:
- Insta GmbH wanted to save engineering hours with CPQ, they saved 1,200 per year.
- Yaskawa wanted to reduce quoting time, they went from 8-day quotes to quotes in one day.
- MAN Truck & Bus wanted to implement a visual solution that would save time and money, with 100% correct visualization, MAN has saved over 80% of its engineering resources.
- Husky Hot Runners and Controllers wanted to reduce solution time, with Tacton they reduced it by 75%.
Every set of KPI’s different, but it’s important to note the setting your targets before you implement CPQ are an important part of any project. Without having concrete goals to reach you won’t be able to see if the project is being managed properly. These metrics can be tracked using CPQ analytics that measure both business and customer success.
These common mistakes can be easily avoided by asking the right questions before and during your CPQ implementation. Now that you know the potential pitfalls it’s time to take a deeper look into how to take your CPQ project even further with Tacton Smart Commerce.