MHW Magazine News and stories from the Materials Handling Industry
Worldwide software provider Cincom Systems has a new client: Fassi Group. Fassi, a major supplier of custom-built industrial cranes, has chosen Cincom Acquire to increase the speed and accuracy of orders and provide guided selling to its international dealer network.
Cincom Acquire is a guided selling and product configuration software platform designed to help companies sell complex products and services.
A key consideration for Fassi Group’s selection of Cincom Acquire was its ability to handle complex custom products with ease. Fassi had tested other configuration products in the past, but these were dismissed as Fassi’s rules definition and management were far too complex for them to handle. It was important that the configuration solution chosen could completely be controlled in-house and be integrated with their ERP system. This way the production people who know cranes inside out could implement the projects―not their IT specialists.
"The Cincom product is a very powerful and versatile engine, able to cope with complex products and processes that are hard to manage, and producing error-free results," said Roberto Calegari, Group Supply Chain Manager, Fassi Group. Fassi’s goals are to increase the efficiency of the entire front end (configuration and sales) as well as back-office processes (from planning to production), while more effectively monitoring the dealers’ activities.
Immediate Results
Fassi is now able to receive configurations from all over the world 24 hours a day. Orders from very different time zones (e.g., Australia and Canada) are already in the system when the Italian sales office starts working in the morning.
The configurator project took around six working months to implement with a group of four Fassi people. Calegari, who was surprised at how quickly the Cincom configurator was up and running, said, "After four or five days of training, we could already start using it."
Cincom Acquire automates the effective selling of complex products and services. It enables true collaborative selling processes and provides guided selling, channel and distributor collaboration, sales and product configuration, as well as quotation and proposal management and integrates with existing systems including Cincom CONTROL, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP and salesforce.com.
Cincom Acquire has helped manufacturers selling complex engineer-to-order or configure-to-order products successfully streamline their sales, design and proposal processes by delivering critical product and sales knowledge to the point of sale, while significantly reducing "quote to cash" time. Cincom has helped manufacturers reduce proposal generation time from five days to 15 minutes, decrease time to close a sale by 80 percent and cut lead times from 14 weeks to six weeks.
