These days, even in the B2B world the demand for customization and a compelling user experience is growing for highly configurable products. Sales reps face more pressure to produce winning quotes faster and more profitably. At the same time, the different applications that need to communicate with each other to optimize sales enablement have, quite frankly, made integration issues a major headache for IT departments. So, uniting back-office with front-office processes is more crucial than ever.
For decades, we’ve been helping companies sell custom products and variants using simple, smart tools for configuration and guided selling that streamline processes within the larger lead-to-cash process.
That’s why we’re offering integration enablers for SAP. As the world’s leading provider of business software solutions, SAP helps hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the world manufacture and deliver configurable products.
Tacton CPQ can leverage the product data and configuration rules from SAP ERP and SAP Variant Configurator (VC) to deliver accurate, up-to-date pricing, bundling and product configuration information to sales teams, partners and end customers.
Seamless and structured, or still in silos?
For many businesses, the processes, tools, and expertise they need to optimize lead-to-cash are still stuck in silos. Information simply doesn’t flow smoothly from one business function to another. And there is no single “record of truth.”
With Tacton CPQ’s configuration and needs-based selling solution, users can configure complex products quickly and accurately using up‑to‑date, authoritative master and transaction data from SAP ERP. SAP remains the system of record where the data is maintained. Tacton integration enablers makes that data available for sales configurations and can send the correct order material downstream into SAP. This way, companies can rest assured that their sales teams and partners quote products that are actually buildable and optimally priced and sold.
How it works: The lead-to-cash flow
Here’s how it works from the business user’s point of view. Product inventory, capacity, and available-to-promise from SAP ERP are made available to the quoting process in your CPQ tool. After this is done, your opportunities and quotes are created in CPQ and pushed to SAP sales order management. Finally, to complete the order-to-cash process, you process and ship your orders, invoice them and collect payments within SAP. The entire process is completed when inventory is updated and made available to the CPQ tool for the next quoting cycle.
SAP VC – Tacton CPQ
If you you are using SAP VC, you can mirror the product information model and rules/dependencies of VC in Tacton’s product model via our standard Tacton Administration APIs. In this way you can leverage your SAP VC investment, but at the same time get all the benefits of using a proper sales configurator. Watch this webinar to learn more about our best practices of working with SAP VC and Tacton integrations in the past.
Main benefits
Reduce manual errors
- Automated order data transfer minimizes order errors
- Reduce the reliance on technical experts in the sales process
Increase order accuracy
- Quote and place orders with correct configuration data and precision pricing
- Full connection between articles in quotes and materials in SAP (SBOM > MBOM)
Optimize the manufacturing process
- Drive production planning/MRP from the sales order
- Automatically build production forecasting on proposal and order data
- Secure an understanding of available-to-promise, capacity and lead time
Why not test Tacton CPQ on your organization’s SAP data? Contact us today to get started.