The client is a US-based company with an extensive background and a significant international footprint. They provide a wide array of offerings across segments including protective systems, connectivity and assembly solutions, and temperature regulation technologies.
With widespread operations worldwide and a complex product line, it was crucial for the client to put a unified platform in place to manage their complex quotation process.
Key Challenges
Examining the client’s existing quotation processes revealed the following requirements and challenges:
- Streamlining quotation management: The client needed to accelerate sales by enabling fast and accurate calculations while expediting the approval process.
- Managing multiple quotation tools: The use of various platforms across regions and business units resulted in long sales cycles, disconnected processes, and error-prone quotes, which hindered sales growth
- Improving quote approvals: The sales team faced challenges from limited visibility of pending approvals during negotiations, leading to long sales cycles, lost prospects, and low customer satisfaction.
- Maximizing margins: Due to manual calculations and limited margin visibility during negotiations, the sales team struggled to offer the right discounts to protect and maximize margins
- Integrating CPQ systems: The legacy configure-price-quote (CPQ) systems were not integrated with the customer relationship management (CRM) or downstream enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, resulting in data silos, redundancies, inconsistencies, and effort duplication.
- Enhancing reporting capabilities: The absence of ready-to-use reports and difficulties in configuring available dashboards, besides missing AI-based scenario reporting capabilities, restricted performance
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The Solution
A CPQ tool is a key asset in sales to help close deals with optimal margins.
The Infosys team leveraged its expertise to develop a unified platform for the quote generation process across various lines of business, including projects and estimation. The solution was delivered in three phases:
- Implementation of SAP CPQ MVP for the Proposal and Estimation division, followed by a rollout to six countries in the EMEA region
- Implementation of SAP CPQ for the Products division, integrating Salesforce CRM and SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), Vertex, Price f(x) and Product Information Management Systems
- Implementation of SAP CPQ for the Project division in the NAM region, integrating Salesforce CRM and SAP ECC and Novacura systems for efficient quotation management
Key features of the solution:
- Smooth integration with SAP ECC for consistent customer and material data
- Seamless integration with front-end Salesforce CRM to maintain the user journey from CRM to the CPQ application
- Configuration of complex products in the Products division, including SAP Variant Configuration (VC) integration with SAP CPQ to create complex quotes
- Utilization of complex pricing data from the ECC system during quotation creation and approval
- Improvement in product catalog management through CPQ-PIMS integration
- SAP CPQ-ECC integration to facilitate quote-to-order conversion
- Integration with the Business Warehouse (BW) system for enhanced reporting and dashboard capabilities
- Integration with third-party systems for quotation data exchange for approval management
Empowering Sales Teams to Drive Growth with SAP CPQ
- SAP CPQ enabled the system to leverage pre-defined rules and templates, reducing the turnaround time for the quoting process significantly
- Automated pricing rules and algorithms, based on product configuration, discounts, and promotions, eliminated manual pricing calculation and errors
- Streamlined approval workflow with automated notifications and escalations accelerated the approval process, preventing bottlenecks
- Seamless information exchange across ERP, VC, BW, Price f(x) and Vertex, ensured smooth data flow and synchronization between systems, enabling efficient and accurate quoting
- SAP CPQ's configuration flexibility allowed business units to adapt the quoting process to their specific needs, pricing models, and sales workflows
Benefits
Faster sales
Quicker and error-free quote generation, reducing the sales cycle
Standardized process
A unified platform integrating different systems to manage the quote-to-cash process at the organizational level
Better margins
Visibility for sales teams into how discounts affect margins during negotiations, helping them protect and maximize profitability
Personalized quotes and proposals
Accelerated generation of high-quality, personalized, and accurate proposals, increasing the likelihood of winning deals
Improved reporting capability
Good quality quote data to eliminate process bottlenecks, improving overall efficiency
