Webshops are online miracles that help you actively participate in trading. Visitors can come to your online shop through numerous channels, such as search engines, social media, word-to-mouth, and more. Once they land on the page, they can simply select the products they want, add them to their basket, and the order is confirmed. What if your factory would be able to do the same thing? When it comes to manufacturing, there are often special needs involved from the customer. With special needs, we do not refer to simply a different name on a T-shirt, but completely different products. How can we make this possible on a website? Lets know for Making your factory work for you as easily as a webshop does:-
Table of Contents
Create a strong configuration tool
If you are planning to sell online, you need a strong configuration tool that allows customers to configure their products. You can think about it as an IKEA online closet configurator on steroids. CPQ software can help you to achieve this. CPQ allows, among other things, to create a configurator for your website. You can even visualize the configurations created using 2D and 3D models, according to your own needs.
Usability is what matters
Configuring a complex product should feel as intuitive as does a T-shirt configurator. Since CPQ software has experience in developing these kinds of configurators, you can leverage off-the-shelf capabilities to start with your configurator.
Full product configuration is no prerequisite
Although you would expect it, the full configuration of the products is not needed. For example, users could configure the product for up to 80% and then request a consultation. During this consultation, engineers and sales managers can assist the customer in getting the remaining 20% according to their needs.
Move your engineering capacity to where it matters most
Traditionally, lots of effort is being spent on “sales engineering”. This concept refers to the fact that engineers spend time configuring special needs from customers as part of the sales funnel. This is appreciated by customers but does come with a huge burden of costs and lack of innovation capacity. When you can let customers configure their products (at least to a large extend), engineers can focus on what matters most. Innovating your product and moving ahead with new functionalities and capabilities.
Leveraging Autodesk CPQ
Nowadays, it is even possible to directly integrate the CAD models into the CPQ by using Autodesk CPQ. This makes it possible to move from configuration to production in a fast and efficient process. If your customer desires, you can even send CAD models as an attachment to the quotation created. Some CPQ solutions even go a step further by integrating with ERP solutions. This allows for the creation of a Bill of Material (BoM) that orders the required components. These process enhancements make it possible to effectively automate large chunks of work in the order and production process.
