Manufacturing Margin Excellence Comes From Accurate Quotes with Real-Time SAP ERP Integration

Integrating SAP-based business rules drives more accurate quoting to solve manufacturing’s pricing complexity issues and ensure profit-optimizing prices

Key Takeaways:

• Manufacturers need to focus to margin excellence by taking a hard look at their quoting process
• While tempting to look to operational efficiencies for margin improvement – leaders should look at initiatives that increase margins for the biggest impacts
  Delivering accurate quotes is the root of margin excellence
• This requires accurate data moving from your back end SAP ERP to front end systems–from product configurations, to volume discounts, to availability and it must be available in a system that externally-facing employees and distributors use regularly.
• Incorporating your business logic into your quoting system is the only way to eliminate errors, increase margins, and provide accurate quotes to your customers
• Follow the cases of two industry leaders who used integration to improve margins and increase profitability

How is your bottom line? More importantly, how are your margins? With hundreds, perhaps thousands, of possible product configurations, aligning manufacturer pricing and supply chain rules with the quotes you’re giving to dealers, distributors, and direct customers can be almost impossible. Pricing gets even more complex with SAP Variant Configurations. Oh, and you need to get quotes out the door as fast as possible–and that can’t be measured in weeks and months.

Accurate quotes improve margins, revenue and customer satisfaction. A quoting solution that is only partly integrated leaves room for customer dissatisfaction and pricing inaccuracy–and due to the complexity of manufacturing SKUs and configurations, it’s tempting to try a ‘good enough’ solution.

Don’t mistake rising revenue with improving margins

Rising revenues don’t always generate a corresponding increase in profits. Especially in today’s economy where supply chain prices are fluctuating dramatically, and often. This requires accurate overall pricing and configurable quotes, which go hand-in-hand with customer satisfaction and loyalty. This means eliminating dual maintenance of pricing systems, eliminating middleware, and ensuring the latest SAP data is reflected in all quotes.

Manufacturing pricing and selling have both undergone a huge change in recent years. Companies that once sold products with volume discounts or other one-size-fits-all pricing are faced with customers who demand products specifically tailored to their needs with personalized pricing. Managing the bottom line becomes difficult when you’re facing aggressive competitors at the same time who eat away at your margins. To achieve margin excellence requires a technology solution that provides the data you need from your SAP ERP to your front-end quoting, sales, and eCommerce systems.

Data integrated from SAP ERP propels margin excellence for Stanley Black & Decker

You can do nothing without accurate data. Take a page from Stanley Black & Decker, where pricing and customer knowledge used to reside only in the heads of estimators and salespeople. Everything was manual, and key-in errors meant inaccurate pricing, items sent to the wrong location, and other issues that led to dissatisfied customers.

By integrating all the business rules and customer data residing in SAP ERP with their front-end systems, they were able to provide accurate quotes for all transactions while enabling the flexibility their sales team needed to close deals without risking major mistakes. Some great side effects of this were a huge decrease in customer service issues and quick ROI on their technology investment.

Car wash supplier Sonny’s aligned SAP ERP with their CRM to create margin excellence

Then there’s Sonny’s, the largest global manufacturer of conveyorized car wash equipment, parts, and supplies. Their quoting process was a margin-excellence nightmare. Mismatches between the SAP data and their CRM meant the sales team would struggle to access accurate customer pricing that included all business rules and customizations as well as inventory data. Providing the wrong price would not only create a bad customer experience, it also affected margins.

SAP ERP and CRM integration removed the obstacles to delivering perfect pricing along with flawless transactions by providing real-time data without the errors that had plagued them across disparate systems.

The speed of business today along with customer expectations and increased competition require a robust solution that leverages your business logic to produce the accurate quotes that power true margin excellence.

Learn more about how enosix can help streamline your quoting process and provide the kind of customer experience that rakes in the revenue. Schedule a demo today.