Automated selling tool is an integral part of manufacturing and distribution environment, especially for those manufacturing companies that make configurable products.
Product Configurator is an application which simplifies the process of creating and tracking made-to-order products in an ERP/CRM system. The main purpose of this application is to configure a product and then place an order comfortably. The consumer will absolutely love a product configurator app because they are entitled to have a magical ability to define the product they want to purchase. At the same time, it is going to help the company to an impressive extent as marketers, engineers, product managers, sales persons—everyone can use it.
The customer gets intrigued when they have an intuitive and personalized experience with their product configurator which finally leads to the purchasing. The customer gets clarity on product with the ability to view the final product. A good configurator would give the options for language, currency, pricing, etc. This enables easy calculation and creation of complete quotations, contracts, orders, and other sales documents in any language. Graphical UI of the application offers an enhanced visual representation of the product with point-and-click access to its details. This saves lot of time of the product specialist of a manufacturing company who keeps giving product demo to the customers.
What are the advanced features?
Options – A product configurator can provide a number of choices to create a desired product. Defining a product becomes much easier if there are various options. A good configurator app can offer excellent menu screens enabling the user to have all the required options. If the configurator is created with intelligent choices for the users, then they can define their product with ease as well as obtain the exact product they wish to have. It would be a great help to users in getting to know and choose available features, options, and dimensions. This ability to choose options ensures the user to define a valid and accurate product.
Rules – This is another feature that helps the user to opt for a dream product. Here, the sequence of options will be displayed as per the rules directed for the previous screens. How does this help the user and the manufacturer? The logic applied into the program prevents the user from choosing an option which does not go with the other parts of the product. This ultimately helps the consumers to avoid selecting the incompatible product options to process the orders. Because of these advanced features, things become more simplified. There is no confusion or complication as the rule based configuration takes the user to the right path to create the right kind of product.
Parameters –This is another widely used and desired method where the user has clear parameters to choose from. Size, color, material, height, width, thickness or such parameters can be set as per the need. With this option, the product can be configured by the specifications. This is usually a perquisite for many customers. With an application like product configurator this is possible and the manufacturer will be in a better position as they are providing an ultimate CRM solution.
Why should manufacturing companies have a product configurator app?
When the manufacturing company can provide product configurator, it is as good as having an expert sales representative or the engineer interacting with the customer about the product and leading them to select the right product as per their wish. The customer self-serves access to key data and information about the product and for the business owner it is an aid to management of business process flow, management of production work orders, calculate demand plans leveraging historical data, calculate supply plans, etc.
Other benefits at a glance:
- Automates the configuration of products.
- Automatically generates made-to-order purchase or work orders.
- Stops users from choosing incompatible product options.
- Intelligent price management options.
- Considerably reduced time required to customizing components like prices bills of material, and proposals.
- Online purchase order creation and submission.
- Eliminates the need to use external applications external to calculate pricing.
- Reduced errors leading to rework.
- Self-sufficient sales, distribution, and customer care.
- Eliminates the need to create and support custom developed configurator applications.
- Real-time visibility into the details of key inventories.
- Automated inventory replenishment. Extensive inventory management.
What are the features you should look for in your product configurator app?
- Menu configuration option, custom pricing options.
- eCommerce integration, inventory management.
- 2D Drawing, 3D Modeling, & CAD Integration.
