By now, most companies have been able to stitch together their various applications, either through Web services, custom-built add-ons or commercial integration technology that many of the vendors began offering a few years ago. The missing link, according to many end users, has been an intuitive user interface.

When complex manufacturers were surveyed and asked about the biggest enterprise application challenges they faced which resulted in loss of time or wasted resources, they inevitably responded with one of two issues:

1. Loss of time and resources due to the need to search through complex navigation structures to find required information/data/functions
2. The need to learn an ever-growing number of modules/applications/functions all with totally diverse navigational structures and conventions.

It is clear that the need for a usable Enterprise Integration software that can integrate with numerous systems, databases and tools is essential for a complex manufacturer in order to cut down on time loss and increase productivity. If your knowledge management applications and product configurators are not properly integrated in way that your power sellers and front office staff can actually use, intuitively, than you are losing the ability to draw upon your existing knowledge base and expert-knowledge, leading to incorrect and inaccurate quotes and orders.

Cincom’s Enterprise Integration for Complex Manufacturers addresses the need for a powerful quote-to-order solution integrated within the existing Enterprise landscape. A seamless integration that provides powerful tools with effective quote management capabilities, product and sales configuration functionality and, above all, an intuitive interface that your sales teams and front office staff will actually use.

Cincom’s Sales Configurator is an industry leader in flexibility and true knowledge management. On a global scale, manufacturers with engineer-to-order or configure-to-order products have successfully streamlined sales, design, and proposal processes by using Cincom to deliver critical product and sales knowledge to the point of sale and reduce “quote-to-cash” time significantly.

Cincom Acquire delivers guided selling and product configurator solutions for complex manufacturers, including those who use Salesforce.com. This enables Salesforce.com users to win more orders and to fill those orders on time and accurately, even in a complex environment.

With the power of the Cincom Sales Configurator integrated with the power of Salesforce, service partners are able to help their clients to improve vital front-office processes such as product configuration, estimating and bidding, and quotation and proposal management.

How Easy is the Intergration?

To the end-user, simple integration between the two products was vital to success. With Sales Configurator and Salesforce, integration is seamless. A simple button appears on the Salesforce menu marked “configure product.” This button opens a web-based version of Cincom’s Sales Configurator for Salesforce and lists all of the products that can be configured. Products configured in Cincom’s Sales Configurator are stored in the Salesforce application.

Guided Selling for Salesforce.com users generates sales quotations that are custom-formatted to each customer based on expert and business rules.
Proposal and Pricing Management for Salesforce.com users creates pricing and proposals that include product configurations, contracts, and drawings.
Product Configurator for Salesforce.com users performs complex calculations based on expert rules that drive product configurations and guided selling to an entirely new level.

Guided selling and Product configurator software has been a proven solution to complex manufacturers across the globe. Time and again these unique, powerful and efficient software solutions have applied state of the art technology and development along with proven business practices and management to obtain an increase in ROI that makes businesses wonder why they waited so long to procure the product in the first place.

Guided selling and Product configuration software is the solution for companies that sell complex products and services through both direct and indirect sales channels. The ability to simplify complex selling while accelerating the sales cycle itself and minimize costly errors is the fastest and most efficient way to broaden sales channels and lower the end-cost to sell.

Here are just a few of the corporations that have procured Cincom Acquire’s Guided Selling and Product Configurator software, and the benefits that they have seen against their original benchmarks and metrics:

1. Siemens Energy and Automation: An industrial electric motor manufacturer
Cut certified motor performance data generation time from 4-6 weeks down to less than 1 hour
2. Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.: An industrial gas and equipment manufacturer
Cut lead times from 14 weeks down to 6 weeks
Reduced errors on orders by 28%
3. Greenheck Fan; A ventilation equipment manufacturer
Reduced order processing time from 2 days to 2 minutes
4. Sultex (an ITEMA GROUP company): A weaving machine manufacturer
Reduces complex sales cycles by 50%
Reduces order processing time from days to minutes

These metrics are real, the benefits to the corporations and manufacturers are real, the product is real. Cincom Acquire’s Guided Selling and Product Configurator software met the needs of these companies and then proceeded to far exceed them.

Hi! It’s Donna from Cincom’s PR department. We have some great news about Cincom Acquire we wanted to share.

You can view it with all the images at http://www.prxbuilder.com/link.aspx?p=1017. But here’s the text. We even included a YouTube video!

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Greenheck Fan reduces order-entry workload by 50%

CINCINNATI, Ohio ― December 15, 2008 -

Worldwide software provider Cincom Systems announces today that Greenheck Fan (http://www.greenheck.com/), a leading manufacturer of air-movement and control equipment, has successfully implemented the Cincom Acquire^TM Guided Selling and Product Configurator (http://www.cincomacquire.com) and has streamlined their order-delivery process through the instantaneous transfer of system information to the shop floor.

In addition, the Cincom Acquire Guided Selling and Product Configurator has reduced Greenheck Fan’s order-entry process from two days to two minutes, reduced rework, and decreased order-entry staff workload by 50 percent.

 Greenheck Fan tells how they benefited from Cincom Acquire

Prior to Cincom, Greenheck Fan needed to improve operational efficiency by automating the product ordering process from field to factory. Greenheck needed a system that could eliminate time-consuming manual processes, but be easily integrated into legacy fulfillment systems.

Together, Cincom and Greenheck Fan have streamlined the field-to-factory system so they no longer rely on manual processes to verify they have the right products. The system delivers the information to the shop floor in minutes with quick-build initiatives fully supported. The new field-to-factory system ensures less rework and more satisfied customers. Now, Greenheck builds design requests into the standard offerings.

“Prior to using Cincom’s [Guided Selling and Product Configurator], our process was totally manual and paper-driven,” said Thad Brockman, Manager of System Analysis and Business Intelligence, Greenheck Fan. “We received our orders via fax, via mail … it took days before we could enter the order into the system.”

“We have significantly reduced the number of people that actually process orders,” said Diane Resch, Business Analyst Team Lead, Greenheck Fan. “Five years ago we had 20 people entering orders, and today we have fewer than 10 people entering three times that order volume.”

By eliminating rework, Greenheck is also benefiting from much greater customer satisfaction. A customer selects the product based on performance needs, and manufacturing requirements for the manufacturing floor are instantly created. This eliminates the in-between work that had to happen in the past. The Cincom Acquire Guided Selling and Product Configurator can take customers’ performance needs and turn them into manufacturing requirements. Since working with Cincom, Greenheck’s orders have increased threefold.

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.

Product configuration has become a necessary component for many a complex guided selling manufacturer. Whether you are a global manufacturing enterprise or a regional company still growing into its own, you cannot escape the intricacies of complex manufacturing, namely, the detailed design and product configuration processes that maintain competitiveness in any industry.

Product pricing and configuration has become a science of its own. Streamlining the process to take out unnecessary steps has led many companies to a greater ROI and a happier, more productive workforce. As your company grows you’ll find that there are hidden expenses tucked away in places that are hard to find. It is your job to uncover them and eliminate them. Nothing does that better than refining the manufacturing process and configuring your products using the latest state-of-the-art configuration tools.

You need to ensure accurate quotes, optimal pricing structures, integration with your ERP and CRM solutions, flexibility, and deployment of expert business rules. With the right sales and product configurator you will see your organization rise to better challenges and greater profitability.

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well.

Social networking is making channel management more about walking the talk and less about claiming a partnership with another company by virtue of logo sharing.  It’s making channel relationships real again.  And this authenticity is a very good thing.

But why dive into the social networking pool?

Isn’t it full of self-promoting opportunists who would rather help you as long as it helps them and furthers their own goals?

Or is deeper than that?  Does it address some fundamental unmet need in relationships, both personal and professional?

I think it is the latter; people’s personal and professional lives have never been more disconnected, there have never been more opportunities for confusion over how to get to the truth and deliver it.  In the area of channel relationships, the ten reasons for making social networking part of your channel strategies are as follows:

1. It’s time to communicate with your channel partners using the processes, systems and apps they want to use. Manufacturers are finding social networking makes them more responsive and gets barriers out of way, staying more relevant to their channel partners over time.
2. This is the era of transparency and authenticity, embrace it and win or ignore it and lose. It’s time to drop the pretenses and get real with channel partners.  Trust is the new currency.
3. Your toughest competitors aren’t in other companies; they are distractions to your channel partners’ time and attention. Using social networking to cut through clutter is a competitive advantage.  Can you say what the top three unmet needs are of each channel partner?  If not, then communication isn’t happening as much as you need it to in order to serve them?  Cut through the many distractions between your company and its channel partners and resolve to understand and stay current on those unmet needs.  Social networking as a real-time platform can help do that.
4. Lead escalation and management can be managed in real-time and be less of a source of conflict than it is today. One of the main problems that served as the catalyst for channel processes to become more automated was the continual arguing between channel partners and those they represented when it came to lead management and escalation.  Relying on portal platforms including Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com there are literally thousands of companies managing leads and their escalation processes through automation today.  Social networking’s contribution to this is gaining real-time updates and querying on status, and bringing in technical teams when needed.
5. Coordinating on advertising, CO-OP, channel promotional programs and product introductions can be truly collaborative when social networking is used versus being sporadic and incomplete when done manually. Consider the first product introductions you were involved with and how they have progressed today.  Some of you may have had companies overnight packages of materials; others may have used a portal.  Using social networking platforms can deliver more speed and accuracy than has been possible in other approaches, especially those that are manually-driven.
6. The long-ago vision of Team Selling in Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platforms is now a reality in social networking. If knowledge and insight into solving tough customer problems is how you win business over just price, then social networking can make team selling all the more valuable.
7. Bring your service attitude to social networking. It’s great that companies including JetBlue, Starbucks, Southwest and others are relying on Twitter to connect with their customers and listen to them.  If there is only one task you take from this blog entry be sure to check out the excellent index Jonathan Kash continues to expand at http://www.socialbrandindex.com/.  If you join Twitter follow him at @Time@simplify too.
8. Get plugged in to what your customers really think. I’m fascinating with how social networking could contribute to the DMAIC process of Six Sigma, specifically in the area of Voice of the Customer.  Don’t get that formal though; get plugged into your online reputation first.
9. Look three years down the road of social networking and realize that the accumulated interactions your company has can become the basis of a more market-driven, responsive content management system. Every company struggles with knowledge management, yet in collaborating with channel partners, critical knowledge in your company can be captured and put into context.  The area of defining roles, processes and taxonomies is coming to social networking, and that will transform it completely than it is seen today.
10. Social networking is more about learning and serving, especially with channel partners. I’ve seen companies dive into social networking and try to take it into the promotional aspects only and lose credibility in the process.  Realize that the entire life-cycle of how you serve channel partners must be planned for on a social networking platform.

Bottom line: Look to learn how your channel partners want to communicate, challenge assumptions about your existing channel management platforms, and when you consider social networking, consider each phase of the lifecycle of your channel management strategies.  Taken together, getting more transparent, responsive and focused can improve your and your channel partners’ performance.

No matter what it is everyone wants to visualize or “see it with their own eyes”. IT professionals demand their tools be more visual; from workflow to data schemas to 3D renderings of engineered parts being stronger than ever before. Even Google is being passed over for youTube as indicated by Dan Simerlink, “My 12 year old son doesn’t go to Google, he searches youTube because he wants to SEE the results; movies, tutorials, how-to videos.”

With all of this clamoring to visualize it seems that knowledge acquisition and representation has been left behind. The “old school” ways are being passed on to the technology generation with little or no complaint. They don’t hesitate to get out their Excel spreadsheet, notepad, database table, script editor, etc. With their tool of choice open they cryptically scribe the knowledge they’ve acquired from knowledge workers. An even more daunting task is deciphering the cryptic knowledge when changes are requested. Here’s the question: Why the antiquated techniques?

Using a product configuration or guided selling solution that visualizes knowledge can have huge benefits for any company:
• Reduce time to represent knowledge
• Reduce learning curve for developers/maintenance workers
• Validate rules by knowledge worker
• Allow knowledge workers to represent knowledge
• Represent knowledge more accurately
• Reduce maintenance

See with your own eyes!

visual knowledge

 Here is an example of a visual rule defining the relationship between digital camera picture quality and the picture quality requirement of a potential customer. Demand that your product configuration and guided selling solution visualize knowledge.

Contract management is another aspect of collaboration that large enterprise organizations must be able to handle with finesse.

One aspect of contract management that is an everyday fact of life is regulatory policies. Government oversight is an essential element to most businesses in the U.S. economy and how you manage regulation affects your collaborative relationships as well as the bottom line contract with your customers. The proper automation tools can make the contract management processes easy to navigate and more streamlined.

One of the most effective ways to manage contracts and collaborative relationships simultaneously is through expert business rules. You set the rules and they run automatically. Whenever a member of your team tries to take an action that goes against the rules you’ve set, your product configurator and guided selling solution will trigger a “can’t do that” response based on the rules you’ve set. You just program your product configurator solution to follow the regulatory practices of your industry and not only do you provide better service to your customers and have better relationships with your collaborators, but you stay out of trouble with the regulatory agencies. Everyone wins.