Customized CPQ System
Customizing Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) systems.
Col-Met Engineered Finishing Solutions (Col-Met), headquartered in Rockwall, Texas, is a leader in paint booths, powder booths, and other finishing-system components. When producing ventilated enclosures (such as custom paint-spray booths, powder-coating booths, and product-mixing rooms), Col-Met had problems generating timely and accurate quotes for their customers.
Spray booths are very complicated to Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) because so many of their parameters impact other parameters. For example, if the length of a paint-spray booth is increased, additional airflow fans may be required, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations. Before developing RESPEC’s custom CPQ system, Col-Met generated spray booth quotes manually by using complicated and laborious excel spreadsheets. Their manual quotes were inefficient (requiring approximately 5 hours per quote) and frequently had calculation errors that were discovered too late.
RESPEC created a customized CPQ system with all of the business rules related to airflow, power, lighting, support beams, and material and labor costs that was supported by an easy-to-use interface. Our team’s CPQ system automatically factored in the many different constraints on enclosure dimensions as well as environmental regulations.
Customer-facing quote documents can now be generated in Microsoft Word by using product line-specific templates. Various paragraphs in the document describe the attributes of the product, key components of their attributes, materials, and construction specifics. The quote documents also include a pricing table with standard options and user-selected options, which are considered upgrades.
The RESPEC solution produced many benefits, saved the company valuable labor time, and increased profit margins. Quotes are now generated in minutes instead of hours. As a result, faster quotes generate more sales volume and more accurate quotes result in higher profit margins. Our design features a system in which quotes are more consistent and accurate, and automatically adjust for price changes in off-the-shelf parts and raw materials. As a result of our work, Col-Met’s realized that their previous spreadsheet models did not accurately reflect increases in material costs.
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