CPQ Integrations explained:
Manufacturing is undergoing a rapid change due to customer demands. Customers want a fast and flawless buying experience. But many manufacturers are struggling to meet these demands due to slow internal processes. Many leading manufacturers have turned to Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions to solve a variety of challenges they face, including creating a new buying experience.
While a CPQ can standalone, it’s often paired with CRM, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), and other internal systems. That is why it is important to understand how CPQ integrations can work to help both customers and the company. Let’s look at how Tacton is helping this journey.
What is CPQ integration?
CPQ systems are meant to help manufacturers configure, price and quote their products with speed and accuracy. CPQ integrations are strategic plans to create a flawless customer experience while also removing silos inside the organization.
How do CPQ integrations help manufacturers?
CPQ integrations are a strategic way to help manufacturers in two ways, first for their customer experience, and second for their internal processes.
Customer experience and CPQ integration
Customers are now used to a fast-buying experience, with no hurdles to get in their way of purchasing. With global competition and connectivity, it’s important to be trusted when quoting products. But for many manufacturing customers, a lack of trust has come from a lack of quality quotes and configurations.
Making complex sales of capital equipment simple and trustworthy goes a long way to having customers that buy now and will continue to come back in the future. Creating a flawless and first time right buying experience for customers of highly customizable products has been hard to achieve in the past, CPQ integrations can be a key factor in helping build trust.
CPQ enables manufacturers to improve response time and improve customer satisfaction by creating a consistent user experience through integrations to CRM. The buying experience also can be greatly improved with visualization and CAD drawings that help the customer see their product in real-time quickly and accurately.
With integrations between CPQ and PLM and ERP and Price management systems, the sales rep (or even end customer – self-service) – will have the right product, pricing, compliance data and logic at their fingertips when configuring a complex industrial equipment solution (directly in the sales tool). This means not only fast/instant pricing and solution, but also accurate pricing and solution. This will greatly enhance the buying journey.
Read more on how CPQ integrations help the sales and order fulfillment process
Breaking down silos for internal processes
Creating a smooth end-to-end buying experience for customers is critical, but it can’t be done if internal processes don’t work. Many B2B manufacturing companies suffer from information silos, causing the customer journey to be disjointed and full of negative surprises. Your sales department offers product variants to customers that your factory cannot produce, and your field technicians cannot service – at least not with a profit.
Issues in the supply chain are not communicated fast enough to sales, meaning that they sell legacy solutions with legacy prices, hurting your profitability. These costly effects increase exponentially with product complexity, affecting your bottom line.
Manual processes also cause trouble when dealing with customer requests. A painstaking back-and-forth between internal teams that is often plagued with errors. This leads to delays for your customers which has them looking for new options. Creating a frictionless relationship between the front office and the back office can help solve many of these issues.
Back-office integrations
Enter CPQ Integrations. CPQ integrations with PLM and ERP enables you to leverage your master data in those systems to build a company shared and one source-of-truth product definition in Tacton, that can mitigate between all limitations of products structure, market, price, manufacturability and serviceability. The interconnected data flows are continuously maintained all through the product lifecycle, enabling disruption proof and agile business operations.
Front-office integrations
Tacton CPQ also integrates with front-office tools such as CRM. Integrating with CRM to pull in the right customer data and context to then create a valid, buildable and profitable product quickly. Sales teams will then be able to receive configured line items, customer net prices and quote documents to contribute to their sales forecasting and pipeline creation.
With a direct integration to CAD automation teams can reach out to the PLM and CAD systems to empower sales rep to generate CAD files and drawings for any customized and configured product without the help of engineering for a 100% correct sales BOM to send to ERP system to execute the order. Overall, integrating business critical systems to CPQ creates an end-to-end process that covers every aspect of the business, including product lifecycle management and transactional quote-to-cash process.
In closing
Releasing the power of an entire organization sounds like a pipe dream, but with Tacton CPQ it’s possible to connect customers, sales and engineering all in one centralized place. This leads to faster response times, accurate product configurations, happier customers and bigger profits. With CPQ integrated into business-critical manufacturers will fundamentally how they sell making it easier for their customers to buy.