Cincom’s guided selling and product configurator coordinates its inteface with SAP to form a comprehensive, interactive, quote- to-order selling system that greatly improves the ability to sell and serve customers of complex, highly engineered products.
Using this guided selling and product configurator enables multiframework compatibility for companies that have selected SAP’s R/3 enterprise framework. Many older guided selling systems are not compatible or make use of the pioneering capabilities of SAP’s R/3 enterprise framework, however Cincom’s Sales Configurator for use with SAP extends the business value of SAP by providing deep functionality.

The History of SAP:

The original name for SAP was German: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte, which in German means “Systems Applications and Products.” The original SAP idea was to provide customers with the ability to interact with a common corporate database for a comprehensive range of applications. Gradually, the applications have been assembled and today many corporations, including IBM and Microsoft, are using SAP products to run their own businesses.

SAP R/3:

SAP applications, built around their latest R/3 system, provide the capability to manage financial, asset, and cost accounting, production operations and materials, personnel, plants, and archived documents. The R/3 system runs on a number of platforms including Windows 2000 and uses the client/server model. The latest version of R/3 includes a comprehensive Internet-enabled package.

How does Cincom Guided Selling work with the next generation of SAP?

**Guided Selling for SAP generates sales quotations that are custom-formatted to a unique customer based on expert rules with quote management capabilities
**Proposal and Price Management for SAP creates pricing and proposals that include product configurations, contracts, drawings, and other business specific documents
**Product and Sales Configuration for SAP performs complex calculations based on expert rules, which drives product configurations, guided selling, and complex pricing

Is your small company using SAP? If so and you are looking for a compatible product configuration solution then look no further. Cincom Acquire is here.

SAP has great business solutions for any type of small business and Cincom Acquire’s sales and product configurator is compatible with all of them. Seamless integration is how we’ve managed to stay on top of the game for so many years. We’ve actually made SAP perform better for many small companies.

What we like about SAP is its ability to adapt its own solutions to your business environment. Whether you need an all-in-solution or a specific interface to manage certain aspects of your business, SAP is there to meet the need. And so is Cincom Acquire. Your product configuration needs can be handled right along with your enterprise functions and business intelligence needs without sacrificing any of the capability you are currently enjoying. We want your small company to function like its larger competitors. That’s why we’ve create a sales and product configurator for SAP that helps small companies like yours grow into bigger companies.

Achieving a good profit margin is essential for all companies. Even more so is keeping that profit margin from dwindling month after month. It’s everyone’s primary focus in a company from the factory worker all the way up to the executive. They’re all looking to cut waste, streamline business processes and lower cost. Streamlining the front office is vital. 

 I’ve seen sales order error rates as high as 20% and it’s not uncommon to see companies content on operating with error rates up to 5%. The natural tendency is to think that a 97% order success rate is excellent (after all its only 3 out of every 100 orders that have errors).  This shifts the thinking to the “total cost of ownership” - driving managers to try to define what error rate “can we live with”. 

By how much might a 3% sales order error rate drive profits down? Far more than you might think. 

An often overlooked operating expense that drives costs up is “non-value add” activities. A recent study by the Association of Product Modeling indicates: 

 12.5% of resources are busy with non-value add activities
when the correctness of data falls to 97%.
If it falls to 92% you’ll see resources occupied
with non-value add activities jump to 50%.

-Lars Hvan, Product Customization, pg. 143

Imagine profits if correctness of sales order data was at 100%, eliminating all non-value add activities. Ensure that your sales orders are correct and decrease your errors; increase your profits. And this is easier than most people realize. Cincom’s Product Configurator has a success rate and testimonial profile of customers with over 99% sales order accuracy. 

Don’t settle for sub-par configuration tools.

Continuing the series of best practices for managing your channels during tough economic times, these next four best practices concentrate on integrating systems that in many companies are isolated, forcing processes to be disconnected from each other too.

Despite how tough times can be it’s best to get channels as efficient as possible – being accurate and quick to respond in this economic climate is one of the most potent competitive weapons there is.

Here are the remaining best practices:

Best Practice #5:  Simplify the integration to your manufacturing and fulfillment systems for your channels’ benefit. To be clear, this isn’t just about populating a portal with order capture, order status, pricing and many other applications.  It is about being able to give channel partners real-time status of their orders, project requests, and status of Return Material Authorizations (RMA).  Speed and accuracy are the competitive advantages today, not the portal.  Combined with the 4th best practice, companies across manufacturing and services industries are seeing higher levels of loyalty and multichannel management success when they infuse integration with effective and well-coordinated change management programs.  Those companies attaining best practices in this area are concentrating on making Special Pricing Requests (SPRs), pricing exception management, and pricing optimization available to their channel partners on a 24/7 basis.

Best Practice #6:  Give Your Channel Partners A Chance to Win More With Accurate Sales Quotes. At Cincom we’re finding companies that are attaining the highest win rates on new sales have invested the time to create quoting system that deliver pricing, delivery dates and the unique requirements of customers to manufacturing centers in one, integrated step.  Greenheck Fan’s Field-to-Factory initiative, where customized fan and air movement products are designed to the specific preferences and specifications of customers is a case in point.  Delivering quotes that are on target is one of the best uses of a multichannel management system to earn more sales.

Best Practice #7: Opening up new selling opportunities for channel partners with build-to-order, configure-to-order and engineer-to-order products. Providing channel partners the flexibility of tailoring specific products to the unique needs of their customers is revolutionizing both manufacturing and reseller’s selling and service strategies.  This is especially true for resellers and channel partners competing in the Commercial HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), electrical equipment, industrial and plant equipment, marine equipment, petrochemical systems and equipment and power generation, transmission and distribution businesses.  The challenges that specialty vehicle manufacturers and value, pump and compressor manufacturers face in tailoring their products and services to the unique needs of their customers makes product and sales configuration strategies crucial to their success.  Best practices in providing sales and product configuration to resellers rests on.

Best Practice #8: Reaping the rewards of compliance with contract management.  Managing contracts with channel partners and suppliers is a delicate balancing act, yet critical for earning incremental sales. Companies attaining best practices in this area are integrating pricing, invoicing and sales history into their contract management systems so contracts don’t need to be manually dealt with anymore.  The use of Alerts and exception management give companies attaining best practices in this area more control over complex contract billing, while also compensating for long-term revenue recognition.  The benefits of automating contract management are that legal and regulatory compliance stays balanced instead of dominating channel partner relationships.  In addition, manufacturers report being able to increase how often they are able to deliver a perfect order.  All of this is possible when a contract management system keeps accounting, finance, production, logistics and fulfillment systems in balance.

Bottom Line: Concentrating on keeping your company connected to its channels, and breaking down any process- or system-based barriers internally gives you the strongest competitive weapon of all: the ability to respond accurately and quickly to your channel partners’ and customers’ needs.  Aggressive response wins.

Despite how quickly integrated social networking is becoming in enterprises, it still isn’t scaling to meet the most complex problems faced today. The well-known success stories of customer service being made more accountable and responsive are emanating out of how @ComCastCares, @JetBlue, @SouthWestAir and other companies are using Twitter as a means to better solve customer problems. Before social networking, these customers would be relegated to workflows that treated customers more like cattle than people who made paychecks possible. Twitter, like other social networking sites, has an instantaneous level of accountability to it, and is cutting through processes that got in the way of serving customers, creating a catalyst for process change.

Making Social Networking Pay By Simplifying Quoting and Ordering Workflows

Getting ready to present at the SAP Configuration Work Group Conference last week on the topic of Web 2.0 and its impact on sell-side processes and development tools and applications, the point of how far social networking needs to go became clear. The SAP CWG Conference is attended by developers, system engineers, managers and enterprise-level geeks.

Instead of giving them a Social Networking 101 presentation, I decided to take the more challenging route and attempt to explain how social networking’s customer information could revolutionize sell-side processes, and how this also changing application development. Of the two points, the one of how social networking is changing app development resonated with this audience.

With the audience being SAP-centric, the focus on how transaction pipelines, specifically how their Internet Pricing & Configurator (IPC) and Variant Configurator-based workflows could be made more relevant to customers by the infusion of customer insight from social networking apps was presented. Making online ordering capable of anticipating the preferences and needs of customers through the analysis of social networking data, defining service and support plans that are as unique as each customer, and tailoring product customization strategies based on insights gained are all potential areas that could benefit. These workflows are beyond reliance on APIs and even XML.

Social Networking’s’ Impact on App Development

The more I worked through these process areas of transaction pipelines, online ordering, and stock-balancing service requests from resellers for example, the more it became clear that enterprise-based form development relying on AJAX had the potential to bring customer insights from social networking apps. Imagine being able to have an enterprise form that had all relevant transaction data complete with real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook or any other social networking app regarding conversations with the customer? Or being able to see who cross-shopped and then purchased a customized product and what they had been promised in terms of delivery date? This is beyond a CRM system or an order management system; it is the ability to see how an enterprise makes and keeps commitments to customers and the real-time results of being accountable and transparent.

Despite this appearing to be futuristic, I did find examples of enterprise working diligently to integrate social networking data into these process areas. Toyota has done this on their hybrid new product development and introduction (NPDI) process workflows, in addition to another auto manufacturer working to resolve dealer complaints due to parts outages by using social networking feedback.

Key Take-Aways

From the conversations with the audience after the presentation last week, the following take-aways emerged. It’s interesting to note that many SAP customers had sent their development and programming engineers there to learn more about using IPC and Variant configurators to support new selling strategies. Their insights are provided below:

• The majority spoken with are relying on J2EE-based programming approaches with ABAP integration to support new selling strategies. A few had worked with AJAX for complex online forms. AJAX, even in this enterprise-centric audience, had lots of interest.




• SAP’s enterprise focus is to bring what they are calling harmonization to ERP data so that sales quotes can be produced directly from that system, previously CRM data had been used. Harmonization sounded a lot like integration, and it was great to see SAP product managers speak about social networking as a part of their future direction and their use of Wikis and other socnets internally.




• Customers’ perceptions of delivery performance and order accuracy as measured through social networking queries (Twitter) are getting attention by SAP developers. On this topic I found a dichotomy in this developer community. There are those developers who see social networking as necessary for bring greater accuracy, accountability and immediacy to customer feedback and those that see existing e-mail systems as sufficient. Between the two groups, one developer on his own had attempted to build out an app that would give real-time customer satisfaction ratings with delivered products over time. This was a reverse-grading application that had the customer rate his company with every shipment that arrived. It’s a great idea, using social networking to quantify every order delivered to every customer.

Summary

Personally, I like hanging out with developers and programmers at a conference like this. I learned quite a bit and also found that social networking’s influence on application development, from tools and apps to code being written, is growing. The bottom line is that social networking has the potential to greatly impact these complex, ugly and often chaotic processes companies rely on. The lag time will be the development of app tools that give these developers the opportunity to architect entirely new approaches to solving these problems.

SAP has a great modernization plan. Companies that have utilizing the enterprise resource planning software (ERP) from SAP for over a decade might need to modernize their software and increase efficiency to be more competitive in the 21st century. While you’re at it, why not fill the gaps in your SAP solution with a sales and product configurator that boosts your efficiency?

The Cincom Acquire product configurator helps your guided selling initiatives with SAP in several ways. You can generate customized sales quotations using expert business rules that you set in place and manage those rules from a centralized location. Even better, you can manage your product configurations through SAP with proposal and price management that also includes diagrams, charts, contracts, and other specific business documents relevant to your client’s needs. You set the rules and the product configurator does all the complex calculations. Why hire a mathematician? They’re expensive.

SAP has a long track record in helping large enterprises as well as small- and medium-sized businesses automate their processes for better performance. They solutions for finance, supply chains, information technology, human resources, product development, sales, operations, manufacturing, marketing, and the full range of business processes have helped thousands of companies succeed on a local and on a global scale. That’s why Cincom Acquire is proud to introduct the sales and product configurator that works with SAP as if they were made for each other.

Your complex selling enterprise deserves the best tools that it can get and that’s why the Cincom Acquire team has spent so much time developing a tool that will work with SAP enterprise solutions. Seamless integration is something we are proud of. When you need to generate sales quotations quickly and accurately then the solution that best performs while integrating with the systems you already have in place is the one to consider.

The nice thing about the Cincom Acquire solution is that you set the expert rules on which calculations are based. It’s flexible enough that you can establish your own goals, manage workflow, and drive product configurations that make sense for your company. The Cincom Acquire sales and product configurator for SAP is more than just a fancy software package with a cool name; it’s an enterprise-wide solution designed to save time, manage complex selling easily, and affect your bottom line and ROI for the positive.

A lot of companies are using SAP. Understandably so. It’s a powerful system that gets the job done. But does it utilize as many of your company resources as possible to make your guided selling initiatives more comprehensive and integrative?

Your highly engineered quote-to-order system may need a little more than what SAP’s Variant Configurator and Internet Pricing Configurator can offer. You also need to ensure that the sales people in your organization are organized and able to access the tools they need for a more efficient order management system. With Cincom Acquire’s powered by Netweaver product configurator you can produce quotes that are customized to each of your unique customers based on expert rules that you qualify. In your quotes, you can include product configurations, contracts, drawings, and a load of other documents specific to each client’s needs.

Cincom Acquire’s sales and product configurator for SAP is robust and serves the needs of any complex sales process from beginning to end.