Product Configurator Software

Many companies are looking to bridge the gaps between their CRM and ERP. It is through the search for the perfect configuration product package that, occasionally, businesses loose sight of where they are and what they are looking for.

If your businesses acronyms are flowing so freely that you begin to think of the concept as more of a ‘thing’ than a process, you know it’s time to slow down and remember what you’re talking about in the first place.

Bridging the gap between your CRM and your ERP is vital for a company‘s continued survival and growth, but you‘re not going to be able to do it unless you truly understand what those two things are:

What is CRM?

CRM is Customer Relationship Management as a process implemented by a company to handle its contact with its customers. CRM software is used to support these processes, storing information on current and prospective customers. Information in the system can be accessed and entered by the business from just about any department, with details on any customer contacts can also be stored in the system. Most people us CRM as a general term to refer to a software-based approach to handling customer relationships.

Why CRM? What’s the point?

The rationale behind the CRM process approach is to improve services provided directly to customers and to use the information in the system for targeted marketing and sales purposes. A successful CRM initiative works when it’s implementation is not limited to software installation, but is used in a whole-business strategy.

Complex contracts and projects have traditionally used pricing models that are based on old data, while newer more relevant data is locked away in a separate system. The only way these systems synch is by manual operations that have been passed down through years of the same exact training repertoire. In essence, this makes your company at risk for missed opportunities, sales, and deliveries while driving down the value of those that you do have.

Whenever you have separate systems for your quotes, orders and delivery information there will exist accuracy problems, loopholes in processes and massive amounts of wasted time and energy tying the information together manually to create your contract delivery system.

Contract Management simplifies your internal processes so you can focus on finding new business and exceeding the customer’s requirements in your current business, all the while increasing your profit margin.

The Cincom Acquire Contract Management module supports the collaboration, definition and execution of complex regulated transactions. These transactions often make use of very complex, customized and specialized billing, revenue, funding and invoice ceilings for sales engagements. Contract Management also supports commercial blanket agreements to drive, manage and monitor pricing and quantity levels purchased to date.

If you are using outdated, modulated systems that are not integrated together, you are leaving your business at risk and ultimately participating in the failure of your contract delivery. Only when systems are integrated and fully managed can you measure against your original metrics to find the benefits of:

Regulatory compliance
Improvement in on time delivery
Increased perfect order percentages

One of the biggest mistakes that company with complex products can make is to reinvent the wheel with custom orders. Yes, it is true that custom products are just that, made to order and customized by the business for a specific client and product. It is the basics of products and manufacturing itself that do not change, however. A custom order for even complex products and services will still have quote-to-order, sales and product configuration. While the process itself has unlimited streamlining and correcting potential, the knowledge base for the original process and product will remain intact.

Process management from knowledge management

It is here that we must first apply a knowledge management process to gather the information and data, and then apply the knowledge and context to that data in order to create a knowledge management process that will be a tool, not another repository.

The value of Knowledge Management relates to a business not in the realm of data collection, but in the way in which the contextualized knowledge is managed to enable the members of the business to deal with current situations and effectively envision and mold their future. On demand access to data is nothing without the management that enables the capture, retention, and reuse of the knowledge foundation for imparting an understanding of how the pieces fit together. That in turn must be able to convey to users them meaningfully to some other person.

Access to managed knowledge bases allows your business members to fully address situations with the sum total knowledge of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned about a situation of a similar nature.

Knowledge management is one those business catch all phrases that has permeated the language to the point where some people’s eyes glaze over the second they hear it.

In order to impart the importance of real knowledge management, you have to show your employees three things:

1. What it is, in real terms without execuspeak
2. How it can help them do their job
3. How it can help grow the business

By ditching the execuspeak that so many employees almost instantly tune out, you can get their attention on knowledge management as a process, as a tool, as something real that they can both contribute to and gain from.

By showing your employees how knowledge management can directly assist them in their work, it ties into what all truly good employees want; they want to succeed, and a way to help them do that faster, better and more economically will be welcomed.

By showing your employees how knowledge management will help grow your business, you give them the key to understanding their part in the equation as it relates to the company as a whole, and how they share in the benefits of that success.

Knowledge management is essential to the growth of your business, however even a good knowledge management initiative will fail without the cooperation of your employees.
You know your business culture. Your executives, managers and sub-managers know their staffs and what kind culture of knowledge exists there already. Use the knowledge of your business culture to assess the correct way to build a knowledge management initiative that will be welcomed and utilized.

Knowledge is one of the most important commodities in the complex selling process. When you start your quotation management cycle for each new customer, you likely begin with those known knowns that Donald Rumsfeld talked about. You may even have some known unknowns and then some assumptions based on those and the final category of unknown unknowns. Throughout the selling process, your sales team’s goal is to discover as many of those unknowns as possible and to log them into your knowledge capture software. Is your system efficient?

Knowledge efficiency is critical. Obtaining the right information at the right time could mean the difference between saving your organization thousands of dollars and making an additional ten or twenty thousand or more. One knowledge-based error could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that either you or a channel partner will have to eat. You cannot afford those costly mistakes.

Managing the quotation process is much easier today than it was fifty years ago. With the proper software solution you can ensure that your sales organization is getting the right knowledge at the right time and increasing your ROI at the point of sale. Close the knowledge loopholes in your quotation management process today.

Bottom line, proposal management is all about customer relationships. Does your sales team close more sales? Do they have a better handle on your customers’ needs? Do they spend their time making customers happy or doing paperwork?

It’s amazing how many complex sales organizations bury their sales people in paperwork. We understand that documentation is an important part of the sales and proposal process. But why not automate and integrate that process into your ERP and CRM solutions. Make everything work better together, streamline your order fulfillment, proposal management, and document delivery processes by using a sales and product configurator that meets the needs of guided selling professionals.

When you manage your proposals in a smart way with the right solutions, your sales people will have more time to spend with their customers and that will translate into more sales and a happier work force. Proposal management doesn’t have to be hard - or expensive.

What is product configuration and is it always a world class endeavor? First, with Cincom Acquire you don’t have to worry about whether your product configuration is world class. Your products will be world class and that’s what really matters.

Product configuration is the process of defining and managing the product manufacturing process. It can as big or as small as your company needs it to be. Whether you have one product that needs configuring or multiple products with multiple product lines, the configuration process and guided selling process for complex manufacturers is a necessary one. Automating the processes that go into your guided selling and product configuration are a necessity in today’s marketplace. Many functions are so routine that you cannot leave them to chance. You will save money and increase ROI if you automate the processes and streamline the steps necessary to complete the product configuration process.

Essential functions of the product configuration process include design validation, pricing, order management, and document delivery. There’s no better tool for these functions than the Cincom Acquire product configurator. And when you use a world class software solution like that, you will have a world class product configuration process with world class products.

How do you control errors in the order management process?

You know this, but order management errors can be costly. Make too many with one customer and that customer could find a new provider. Make too many errors overall and you could see your business decline significantly.

One reason many enterprises find themselves making too many errors in their ordering processes is because they haven’t automated. When you automate the order process you can have certain functions that repeat themselves from customer to customer or even for the same customer digitized and handled by a software program that handles the details for you by rote. Get it right once and it stays right forever.

But automation isn’t enough. Integration is also key. And making sure that your ordering process is consistent with the rest of your company’s business functions will make a huge difference. That’s why you need an order management solution that is on the top of its game and built for the 21st century.

Microsoft Dynamics is a great tool for automation and integration. Whether you need a dynamic business management solution for your financial applications, supply chain, or customer relationship management, Microsoft Dynamics can deliver. In fact, it is one of the most used solutions on the market and we respect it.

But like all great software solutions, sooner or later you’ll find a weakness. That’s where Cincom Acquire comes in. We are not looking to replace Microsoft Dynamics. We actually just want to play nicely with it. The Cincom Acquire sales and product configurator was designed to do just that.

With Cincom Acquire and Microsoft Dynamics working together, you’ll be able to generate more sales quotations with greater accuracy and in a shorter time than ever before. Guided selling is a fact of life and until your sales team feels empowered, you don’t have it right. You want your guided selling solutions to be intuitive, fun to use, and productive. And that’s what Cincom Acquire for Microsoft Dynamics is. We improve the unimprovable.

Managing your organization’s knowledge is one of the most important aspects of guiding a complex manufacturing enterprise to global greatness. For one thing, enterprise culture changes daily. And that includes knowledge.

Every time you hire a new employee you are changing your knowledge culture. Every time you promote someone to management you are affecting the culture of your company. And every time an employee quits, is fired or laid off, or retires, a resulting change in culture occurs.

Even within the overall culture of your enterprise, there are various subcultures. Cross-division transfers and cross-channel promotions also affect the culture and the relevant subcultures. Your workflows could change as a result of those transfers. Certain measurable outputs of one unit could go up while the same or similar output of the other goes down. And they may not change at the same speed or depth. Someone needs to be watching this.

With the proper tools at your disposal, you can keep a close eye on the culture and subcultures of your enterprise so that you maximize every opportunity. The importance of managing your tribal knowledge cannot be stressed enough.