Custom. Complex. Configured.
Engineer-to-order products are often highly customized and can be seriously onerous to configure and quote. And with the continued rise of ETO manufacturing, businesses will need to navigate—and overcome—a variety of tough challenges.
- Complex Product Configurations: ETO products are highly customized, and they often have exceedingly complex configurations. CPQ systems must be able to handle a wide range of product attributes, options, and dependencies.
- Integration Complexity: Integrating CPQ software with existing systems like ERP and CRM can be complex, but ETO companies need these systems to communicate seamlessly to ensure accurate pricing, inventory management, and order processing.
- Data Management: Maintaining accurate product data in your CPQ system is essential in any business. For ETO companies, it is mission-critical. Your CPQ must ensure that attributes, pricing rules, and engineering data are up-to-date and synchronized with changes in product offerings.
- Cost Estimation and Profitability: Accurate cost estimation is crucial for pricing ETO products. Your CPQ system must provide accurate cost breakdowns to ensure that quotes are profitable while remaining competitive.
- Sales Team Training: ETO products require extensive, in-depth knowledge to sell effectively. Training your sales team on how to best use your CPQ system and understand various product configurations can seem like a daunting task, but it is crucial to ETO selling success.
- Inconsistent Quoting: Due to the variability of custom ETO products, there is a risk of inconsistent quoting. Your CPQ needs to generate accurate quotes that account for all the customizations and variations in order to avoid over- or under-quoting.
- Customization Lead Times: Accurately estimating lead times for custom ETO products can be incredibly challenging. Your CPQ system needs to consider manufacturing capacity, supplier lead times, and other factors to provide customers with realistic delivery estimates.
- User Adoption: Ensuring that both sales teams and customers adopt and use the CPQ system effectively can be a challenge. The system should have an intuitive and user-friendly interface to encourage adoption.
- Customer Self-Service: Many ETO companies struggle with enabling customers to use CPQ tools for self-service configuration and ordering, as the complexity of the products often requires expertise.
- Scalability: As you grow and expand your ETO product offerings, your CPQ system needs to scale accordingly to handle an increasing number of product configurations and customer demands.
So, how can you streamline and scale the configuration process to support a modern buying and selling experience?
This is exactly the question our webinar “Making Engineer-To-Order Products Simple to Configure” answers.
Together with our partners at Salesforce and ForeFront, we take you through a discussion of how to solve the challenges associated with ETO product configuration and quoting, along with real-world examples.
Watch the webinar recording to see how we can help ETO manufacturers to unlock the power of fast, accurate and seamless CPQ that enables a superb buying and selling experience across channels.
