Yaskawa

The Challenge

To meet the growing demand, the company realized its sale quoting process wouldn’t be able to cope. When quoting for new business, the sales team relied on Excel to capture a list of customer requirements.

This Excel file was handed over to an inside sales group who manually created a quotation based on the list. Yaskawa product portfolio includes over 120 different robot models, all with configurable options and add-ons. Factor in a long and complex price list with customer-specific discounts and the situation gets complicated quickly.

For each deal, the team would waste time chasing information internally, sometimes even needing to involve the Japanese organization to get clarification on product availability, lead times, and compatibility. This, of course, led to delays.

The Solution

Yaskawa decided to look for a sales configuration solution and evaluated three commercial tools. They also challenged whether they needed a commercial tool at all, and looked both at improving their existing Excel calculation and at working with their ERP vendor, SAP.

The first thing that spoke for Tacton was the easy and powerful way the logic is represented within the configuration tool. The second factor was that it can be easily maintained by people in our company. Because the configuration logic is separate from the product data, we found that the modeler just defines the model and the relationships. After that, all the parts, products, prices and lead times can be fed into those models and updated very easily.

About Yaskawa

Founded in 1989, Yaskawa Motoman is a leading robotics company in the Americas. With over 400,000 Motoman robots, 10 million servos and 18 million inverter drives installed globally, Yaskawa provides automation products and solutions for virtually every industry and robotic application; including arc welding, assembly, coating, dispensing, material handling, material cutting, material removal, packaging, palletizing and spot welding.

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