Accelerating Custom Price-Quotes with IoT: A Case Study of a European Material-Handling Manufacturer

• Equipment & Machinery

• Time Sensitive Networking

The European material-handling manufacturer was facing a significant challenge in generating custom price quotes for its customers. The process was complex, involving thousands of possible configurations, and was highly time-consuming, taking up to 10 days or more. The manufacturer receives about 10,000 such requests each year from customers who want to specify more than 140 variables for at least seven truck types, resulting in many thousands of possible custom combinations. The process also required the involvement of engineers for calculation and review, often necessitating clarification and confirmation of requirements, which further delayed the process. Additionally, finding the right quotation from among those already composed was another challenge, as proposal documents could be located in any of a variety of servers and email systems.

The customer in this case study is a European manufacturer of material-handling equipment. The company provides forklifts and other warehouse equipment and services to a broad range of industries in the European and global markets. The manufacturer is known for its innovative use of technology, not only in the composition of its products and services but also in how it services those products. The company receives about 10,000 requests each year from customers who want to specify more than 140 variables for at least seven truck types, resulting in many thousands of possible custom combinations.

To address these challenges, the company adopted Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms for a dynamic, context-sensitive, highly automated workflow. The Special Design Request (SDR) solution, powered by Nintex, was integrated into the company's existing SharePoint data repositories. Distributors acting for customers could access a dynamic, context-sensitive Nintex Form via a company SharePoint portal. The form, which included photos and only showed relevant options, dynamically adjusted those options as distributors worked with it. This helped to ensure that only viable configurations were developed, smoothing the rest of the process. Once the requested configuration was complete, Nintex Workflow automatically pulled pricing data from the manufacturer’s ERP system into the SDR and forwarded the result to engineers for review. The Nintex Form used dynamic exchange-rate data to show accurate pricing in local currencies, a crucial feature given the manufacturer's global customer base. Managers could track and analyze aggregated price-quote data via a Power BI dashboard.

• The implementation of the Nintex Process Platform significantly improved the manufacturer's operational efficiency and competitive advantage. The ability to generate custom price quotes for highly sophisticated, customer-specified product configurations both faster and more accurately than before has been a game-changer. The process that previously took up to 10 days or more was reduced to just 2 days. This faster response time to customers, or to the distributors who sell to the end-customers, has given the company a competitive edge. It has resulted in more wins, and thus more sales and revenues, as customers are less likely to go elsewhere while waiting for price quotes. The solution has also streamlined the process of producing custom quotes, reducing the need for engineers to clarify and confirm requirements, and making it easier to find the right quotation from among those already composed.

• Reduced time to deliver custom price quotes from 10 days to 2 days
• Boosted price-quote accuracy
• Increased customer acceptance rate