Data is important and a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) investment has a wealth of data that many of our manufacturing customers are taking advantage of to learn more about their products. Organizations that aren’t thinking about how to maximize their data to address their problems today are losing time and money on problems they want to solve tomorrow. Enabling manufacturers to use CPQ systems analytics to create both an input and an output can create insights that help with current and future forecasts. Your customers can also benefit from using analytics as they can see how their expectations of a product could be perfect, or use some improvement based on actual data.
The expectation and the input
Every customer is different, each has their idea of how a specific product will work for them. Creating their highly customizable manufacturing product together using CPQ is a great way to speed up a slow process, but let’s focus on the CPQ systems analytics.
Say your customer is looking to purchase a truck (check out how one of our customers does it), they have preconceived notions on the total cost of ownership, where and when it’ll be serviced and how their drivers will treat any truck in their fleet. Your customer equips the trucks with tires pressure sensors, engine diagnostics, elevation measures, GPS, and even gearbox output. Measuring how these items work in the truck can tell a lot about how drivers are using it, and what can be improved if customers dig deeper than just buying the product.
The reality and the action
Now that the truck has rolled off the assembly line and onto the roads the customer drives on the data can begin to be collected. Remember those pressure sensors in the tires? Maybe they haven’t been working so well for the customer. The gearbox may be getting a little bit more beat up than expected and the engine may be suffering because of it. Using GPS and elevation data you can see if the truck was required to take a longer route through rougher terrain.
Capturing this data with CPQ system analytics is critical to adjusting for servicing and upgrades for the next truck. Correct servicing and upgrades can make customers loyal because they know you’re helping them optimize their product. Maximizing this data can help your company create better insight on products to help market future versions to your loyal customers. 
The output
Now that you’ve put a higher value on customer data it’s time to figure out how to use this analysis to understand how expectation vs reality can create business value. Seeing what was in the initial order by the customers vs. How the product was used has a lot of insights that CPQ analytics can shed light on.
Using information such as driving habits can help you sell driver training to help better optimize the use of their purchase. Or those tire pressure sensors that weren’t working so well can be removed from the product portfolio and swapped out for ones that better fit the needs of the driver.
It’s time to take a deep dive into data
If you don’t have a CPQ system in place you may find yourself struggling with the data that comes from creating highly customizable manufacturing products. A spreadsheet about product options here and another spreadsheet about pricing. This decentralized data leads to losing time, money and customer interest by creating a slow sales process. All of that can change using CPQ system analytics. Reviewing how expectations can vary greatly from reality is an integral part of keeping customers coming back. Being agile, especially in the upcoming months, with analytics data can help save time and money.
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