Why Salesforce Can’t Support Manufacturing CPQ Without Real-Time SAP Integration

Quoting got you down? Integrate Salesforce with SAP for the real-time information you need

Key Takeaways:

• For CPQ software to really be effective, you must integrate your front and back end systems
• Middleware and other integration solutions can be cumbersome, error-prone, and take too much time to provide value
• enosix integration solutions are pre-built and often 90% plug-and-play, so you get up and running fast
• Car wash machinery manufacturer Sonny’s was able to solve their quoting problems and grow their enterprise with CPQ integration
• With the enosix solution, ASC Profiles moved from spreadsheets to a streamlined, robust, efficient, and accurate CPQ system

In order to be profitable, manufacturers face the challenge of delivering customized orders accurately while increasing sales. This has led to a boom in configure-price-quote (CPQ) enterprise apps that have resulted in yet another critical IT issue: Integration between front-and back-end systems.

Integration is not optional; it is imperative. You have configuration rules, vendor terms, and your custom business logic in SAP, but when it comes to giving your customer a quote, if that information is not automatically fed into Salesforce in real-time, accurate pricing and delivery times are impossible. Worse, you could sell something that you actually don’t have in stock and can’t get in time to fill the order — and your customers will hate that.

Time is of the essence as your competitors implement their own solutions. With enosix, you can beat them to the punch with a pre-built CPQ integration solution that reduces implementation time by 70%  to 90% and delivers your must-have functionality that gets lost with other approaches.

Whether you are moving to a digital solution from spreadsheets, like ASC Profiles, or streamlining and upgrading your current solution like Sonny’s, the enosix CPQ solutions allow for real-time pricing without having to store any SAP pricing in a separate system. Let’s take a look at why a CPQ system is important, why enosix is the best integration option to enable these systems, and how it works in the real world.

The importance of CPQ 

If you are relying on spreadsheets or a disconnected, siloed system to align with front-end pricing conversations with your SAP rules and logic, you are missing out on these advantages offered by a robust, truly integrated CPQ solution:

• Companies using CPQ have 57% more profit margin growth year-over-year.
• Automating special pricing requests (SPQs) using a cloud-based CPQ system showed an 89% improvement in turning those SPQs into sales.
• A 23% increase in upsell and cross-sell revenue by having the CPQ system intelligently recommend the optimal product or service that has the highest probability of purchase as well as the best possible gross margin.

Sounds good, but there’s an important thing to note – traditional middleware integration strategies for quoting tools and CPQ systems require maintaining a duplicate set of prices outside of SAP. This means you have to rebuild all of your customer-specific pricing, rules, logic, Sales Area info, etc. and maintain it in the front-end.

Not only that – most SAP integration projects take more than six months — but not with enosix.

enosix is simply the best integration option

The enosix solution is pre-built, and because it doesn’t require complex front-end coding, middleware, ETL tools, data mapping, or syncing, you can be up and running in as little as a day.

We deliver a pre-built Salesforce/SAP integration that doesn’t require you to write it from scratch, unlike traditional ETL and middleware solutions. It is also highly configurable, allowing Salesforce Admins to:

• Include additional fields from SAP, including custom fields and various SAP Industry Solutions
• Change data field titles so they are Salesforce friendly
• Save customized searches by user profile

Integration also gives you the ability to access real-time data and do a deep dive in SAP for order and quote history, details on invoices and deliveries, credit information, sales area, pricing simulations, and more.

With enosix, you also get the following technical benefits:

• No additional hardware or infrastructure
• 100% APEX and ABAP
• Salesforce and SAP Certified
• No error logs to monitor
• Lower TCO

In short, you’ll keep your products and customers coordinated, gain real-time pricing and inventory availability with customer-specific pricing, and automatically create fully detailed orders in your SAP ERP as soon as your customers submit their shopping cart.

2 case studies of the enosix CPQ solution in the real world

Disparate systems can create havoc and inaccuracy, and for Sonny’s, quoting was a cumbersome business. Sales reps had to access a VPN, connect to a server, and then use an application to generate a quote. Data was mismatched in SAP and Salesforce. There was no single source of truth, and the sales team, as well as distributors, could not find the information they needed because the two separate systems didn’t play nice together.

This meant they had to create runtimes and codes just to send information to their CRM, which created version issues, breakages, and syncing problems. Integration between SAP and Salesforce allowed Sonny’s to evolve and build their enterprise, all with their in-house team.

Sonny’s chose enosix because of its simplicity and the fact that they got up and running much faster than any other approach. With no middleware, the enosix solution was able to leverage all existing SAP processes, business logic, custom fields, and security without the risk posed by process and information replication.

In another case, ASC Profile’s sales team turned to enosix for CPQ integration and now looks forward to work every day with real-time information they can use to generate quotes.

Before their integration, the ASC Profiles sales team was using spreadsheets to manage product configuration and pricing through three separate business units. The sales team would compile their quote in Excel, then create a PDF for signature, email that quote to the client, and send the signed quote to the support staff, who would manually enter the information into SAP.

It’s easy to see why this would cause problems and result in unhappy customers. There were myriad challenges, including the fact that the sales reps had to be experts on every little detail of product configurations, which meant increased training time. There was plenty of duplicate work created, no analytics reporting to allow for quote performance analysis, and no audit trail for quotes.

ASC Profiles’s mature SAP environment had variant configuration and pricing logic that covered more than 2,000 variations for product configuration and pricing. Rebuilding this SAP logic in Salesforce and maintaining it in both locations would require substantial upfront and ongoing maintenance costs, and that still would not provide real-time verification of complex SAP rules that changed frequently.

In just a few months, ASC Profiles realized enormous benefits with increased visibility, tracking, and auditability of quotes. This solution also has cut down on errors and costs because quotes are always configured based on set rules for product groupings and pricing, and there’s no more manual data entry because it all gets passed directly from Salesforce to SAP.

The enosix CPQ integration solution provides a seamless quoting experience

Learn more about how enosix can help streamline your quoting process and provide an optimal, efficient, and accurate process for your sales team and your customers. Schedule a demo today.