Global Utility Leader - Transforming Sales Efficiency - A CPQ Success Story
Overview
A global leader in the utility and city infrastructure solutions industry faced challenges such as slow quotes, inaccuracies, and complex pricing management. With a new CPQ implementation, led by Mainspring, they streamlined the quoting process, enhanced data utilization, simplified complex solutions, and can now efficiently manage proposal documents.
Business Challenge
They faced several significant challenges that required the implementation of a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution. These challenges included:
- Slow delivery of quotes to customers
- Incomplete and inaccurate quotes, leading to margin concerns
- Unusable quote data in spreadsheets, hindering reporting, forecasting, contracting, and ordering
- Limited quote and price analytics
- Complex and confusing management of quote options
Solution Delivered
Mainspring undertook a comprehensive, two-phase approach to address their challenges:
Phase I:
In this phase, Mainspring executed the following solutions:
- Loaded pricing information for over 18,000 products across three business units, incorporating various pricing types, including one-time, subscription, services, and bundled pricing
- Automated distributor pricing and discounting for standard and key/corporate customers
- Implemented support for multiple currencies, with revenue reporting standardized in US
- Automated pricing methods, including list, contract, cost-plus, discount, usage, ramp, tiered, and partner pricing
- Custom quote templates in five languages
- Automated quote approval routing
- Global rollout to approximately 600 users across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific
Phase II:
The second phase focused on enhancing guided selling and complex bundle capabilities:- Implemented complex bundle solutions in Conga CPQ to replace Oracle CPQ and Excel-based quoting tools
- Created custom solutions for automated volume spreading in supply chain management, enabling users to modify quantity distributions
- Automated escalated price and cost calculations year over year, with tiered pricing
- Default corporate escalation percentages mapped products automatically, while users could create custom escalations
- Mapped products to standard sections within proposal documents and enabled custom section creation
Key Results
The CPQ transformation not only streamlined their quoting process but also empowered them to efficiently manage their extensive product catalog and enhance customer experiences. With a more resourceful approach to their operations, Itron continues to support communities worldwide by delivering reliable infrastructure solutions.
Following the successful CPQ implementation, they realized numerous benefits:
Streamlined Quoting Process
Efficient Quote Generation: CPQ implementation enabled quick and accurate quote creation, reducing turnaround time.
Complete and Accurate Information: Eliminated incomplete and inaccurate quotes, ensuring precision and boosting customer confidence.
Enhanced Data Utilization
Unified Data System: Centralized quote data eliminated the need for rekeying, enabling efficient revenue reporting, forecasting, and ordering.
Robust Analytics: Improved quote and pricing analytics provided valuable insights for data-driven decisions.
Complex Solution Simplification
Guided Selling: Implemented rules-based guided selling for both simple and complex bundles, reducing complexity.
Automated Volume Spreading: Enabled forecasting for supply chain management with the flexibility for manual adjustments.
Efficient Proposal Document Management
Customization Capabilities: Enabled creation of custom sections within proposal documents.
Standardization: Organized proposal documents into standard or custom groups, enhancing document management.