Two main approaches exist with respect to product configuration: sales/marketing and engineering-focused strategies. The former has advantages, but could lead to gaps in what a customer is promised to what can be delivered.
Manufacturers may overpromise, partly due to a lack of departmental transparency. If sales and marketing teams don’t understand how customer requests could affect engineering or available options, difficulties will result. This is especially true for highly complex and configurable products.
Using a configure, price and quote (CPQ) system may only take sales and marketing-based viewpoints, thus lack a thorough understanding of all the options customers have, or, more crucially, options that you are unable to provide. As a result, sales and marketing may promote products or features before realizing the complexity and cost related to these solutions—or, worst case, that engineering is unable to deliver. This can seriously harm your brand reputation, and customers might go with a vendor that can deliver what’s needed.
The problem is the lack of transparency when a CPQ system is used in isolation. You may have a sense of how much money you can make from selling a product, but if you don’t properly understand how it will affect engineering or manufacturing, you won’t know how much it will cost to produce or accurately forecast revenue. The same problems apply to designing a new product.
Other businesses, such as those that manufacture sophisticated machinery, might benefit from an engineering-focused strategy. Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems have traditionally handled design and engineering from beginning to end, making product life cycles linear.
Yet many manufacturers allow customers to customize their products to match specific needs, and collect the data and behavioral patterns to identify trends. This era of increasingly complex products cannot be managed using the conventional linear approach, which presents significant challenges for manufacturers as they begin their journey toward digital transformation.
Composable product configurators (CPCs) can remedy the issues of both of these methodologies. Without disrupting current customer installations and processes, integrating your PLM or CPQ with CPC delivers the scale needed to accommodate changing customer needs and the increasing complexity of goods.
A CPC offers a single source of configuration truth. It helps lay the groundwork for close departmental collaboration by enabling product designers and engineers to carry out configurations, engage directly with logic and link to the rest of the business—as well as supply chain partners, providers and even customers.
By only quoting offerings that are consistent across sales, engineering and manufacturing, composable configurators for CPQ can help create a realistic product definition. CPC integrates various viewpoints, and best-of-breed tactics that makes the most sense for you.
Companies with an inside-out engineering focus are often driven by product capabilities. So, they might not be able to understand how new engineering modifications affect sales, revenue and the market as a whole. Companies that prioritize marketing and have an outside-in perspective may not have transparency about what could be sold and how selling new products affect engineering, manufacturing and maintenance costs.
CPC doesn’t require a shift between inside-out and outside-in tactics. It’s about clear information and being aware of the effects of choices when designing, revising and selling products. Combining data via a composable configurator gives all departments insight about opportunities and restrictions, enabling an organization to better manage product complexity, fulfill commitments and to do so profitably.
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