ProVeyance Streamlines Manufacturing with NetSuite CPQ: Faster Quotes, Happier Customers
Company: ProVeyance Group
Industry: A one-stop-shop for companies that need conveyance and related equipment.
Challenge: A manual estimating and quoting process for highly-customized products was time-consuming and cumbersome. The company also lacked visibility into its quoting data and employees couldn’t share the related information across the enterprise.
Solutions: NetSuite Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ)
Results: CPQ reduced the time it takes to generate a new customer quote or estimate from hours to just minutes; helps Woodsage respond quickly to customer requests; and puts the related data into the hands of authorized users across the enterprise. Engineers and sales reps who spent hours developing new quotes can now focus on more strategic projects.
ProVeyance Group is a North American company with two subsidiaries: Woodsage, a manufacturer of high-quality conveyor system rollers and related products and Ashland, which assembles conveyor sections and systems.
The company has been steadily expanding its manufacturing capacity and product lines in order to help its own customers maximize efficiencies and improve their productivity levels. It recently worked with Bryant Park Consulting to implement NetSuite Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), a solution that streamlines the process of selling and fulfilling highly-customized products.
From Manual Work to Streamlined Processes
An existing NetSuite user, ProVeyance wanted to use CPQ for its Woodsage straight rollers, tapered rollers and fabricated products. The company was previously using a manual quoting and estimating process. Due to the complexity and customization of its products, the company was taking anywhere from one hour to days to quote a project.
In addition, the costing and pricing logic for Woodsage’s products was based on “internal knowledge.” This meant that the user—usually a sales rep or engineer—had to know exactly how to cost each component in the manufacturing process. This added more time and manual labor to the project, namely because just one standard assembly product includes anywhere from one to 12 different component items. Each of these component items could also include several manufacturing processes of their own.
CPQ Handles It All
For companies like Woodsage, CPQ provides a way to configure customized product or service options from predefined features, components and variations. The system automatically generates accurate pricing based on the chosen configuration and automatically generates professional, detailed quotes based on those parameters.
The configurator includes built-in logic that dynamically guides the user to available configurations with each click. It also pulls in and calculates component cost, labor cost, sales price, component compatibility, routing step compatibility, run rate and setup time. Users can assign a description, markup or discount to the end configuration (i.e., the assembly item).
Because CPQ eliminates the need for spreadsheets, it gives Woodsage access to data that the company was lacking (or, that was scattered across different systems, computers and spreadsheets). With CPQ in place, the manufacturer can access all of its existing NetSuite data, including item records, manufacturing cost templates, and work centers, in a uniform environment.
A Multifaceted Application
The CPQ configurator offers two main paths of functionality: standalone mode and transactional mode. A Woodsage engineer who wants to configure a “what-if” item and view the cost and price breakdown will use standalone mode. Sales reps can also configure items in standalone mode and save them as favorites. Then, when the customer requests an actual quote, the favorite can be retrieved with a click of a button. Favorites can also be shared across the company with anyone who has configurator access.
With transactional mode, a sales rep who needs to send an estimate to a customer can simply open the quote, launch CPQ, configure the assembly item, and submit that back to the quote as a line item. Woodsage uses CPQ for configuring assembly items, with dynamic Bills of Material (BOM). For its made-to-order products, the line item is unique each time, with a BOM, cost, price, and description being applied to it from CPQ.
CPQ also offers base generic product capabilities, whereby one predefined assembly item is used as a template to be reused repeatedly. This methodology helps Woodsage avoid “item bloat,” or products that include too many “bells and whistles” and are no longer able to perform their core functions. CPQ generates a blueprint for the assembly item, comes up with a production cost, tells what labor (or routing steps) go into making it, and then provides a recommended sales price. If the quote is approved and Woodsage wins the deal, an engineer reviews the configuration and creates that item in NetSuite.
100% Out-of-the-Box
With Bryant Park Consulting as its CPQ implementation partner, Woodsage was able to use 100% of the solution’s out-of-the-box functionality. Bryant Park did some light scripting to run calculations and conducted multiple training sessions to give the manufacturer full autonomy over the CPQ toolkit. That way, companies can put together their business logic in NetSuite CPQ’s framework.
Thanks to CPQ, ProVeyance’s sales team can get basic quotes completed and sent to customers faster. In some cases, this happens in a day or less because the sales rep can handle the quote right away—versus having to send it back to engineering. “It has also freed up engineering quite a bit, so it can focus on more complex quotes and strategic opportunities,” says Woodsage Project Engineer Mark Brown.
Brown says Neal McMahon, his Bryant Park consultant, trained the company on how to build out the configurator—from the user interface to the background code. “He was very patient with us as we came to understand what we couldn’t and could do in CPQ,” he adds. “Neal learned our business and our business terminology,” Brown says. “Overall, CPQ has been a big help for our quoting team.”
“We help Woodsage maintain, troubleshoot and extend the system as it adds products or product streams to its existing CPQ system,” says Neal McMahon, Senior Consultant at Bryant Park Consulting. “We also helped them get quotes out to customers faster and more accurately while also creating work orders from a common piece of functionality, called CPQ base generic item. The Woodsage team really had their arms open to best practices and shows in how the system can be used and maintained”
Faster Turnaround and Happier Customers
Thanks to CPQ, Woodsage now has a much faster turnaround for the estimates and quotes that it sends out to its customers. This directly impacts the company’s time-to-market by helping the manufacturer respond faster and close deals quicker.
With all of its data housed in a single ecosystem, Woodsage has cost, pricing, cost templates, and work centers that play off each other and feed CPQ the most up-to-date, accurate information. And because engineers and sales reps are no longer bogged down by a manual estimating process, they now have time to work on more strategic projects.
