About Conf Industries

Conf Industries is a global provider of customized furniture, logistics, and handling systems for healthcare sector, headquartered in Italy. Conf Industries’ custom trolleys, shelves, cabinets, and tables allow hospitals to move and stock laundry, pharmaceuticals, waste, food, and other materials internally with the highest level of functionality, hygiene, and safety.

The challenge

For well over 60 years now, Conf Industries’ biggest success factor has been its customizable offers. But providing individual solutions for every customer also created challenges in the company. Every quote and order had to go through the technical department to validate its manufacturability. Also, since there was no structured sales tool for the sales reps, customers were sometimes promised solutions that were neither deliverable nor profitable to Conf Industries, creating costly re-works and time-consuming sales cycles.

“The bottleneck that we got in the company was mostly the technical department. So at any time that we were receiving one extra configuration from the customer, we had to pass by the technical department. So that was really difficult.”

Flavio Ventura, CEO Conf Industries

The solution

Supported by Tacton and Tacton’s Italian partner Nuovamacut, Conf Industries was able to describe the full product portfolio offering in Tacton CPQ. Since the product rules in the configurator are now validated by the technical department, only manufacturable product variants are offered to customers. With guided selling questions, the sales discussion can now focus on the customer needs. In addition, Tacton CPQ’s 3D visualization, makes it easy for both sales reps and customers to understand what is being configured, avoiding costly misunderstandings and re-works. Nowadays, every time there are changes in the product offering, the technical department ensures that this is described in the product configurator. In this way, sales always have the most up-to-date information about the portfolio at their fingertips.

“Sales cannot even think about making a new offer without the configurator. And the technical department cannot even think about developing a new product without thinking about building the Bill-of-Material for the configurator. So, everything is now linked, and everything now works with the configurator.”

Diego Gavezzoli , CPQ System Owner

The results

Thanks to Tacton CPQ, accurate quotes and orders can now go directly to the ERP system, reducing the workload of the technical department by 80-90%. This speeds up lead times, making customers happier, without having to stress the technical department. Relying on the product configurator, sales reps now feel confident that they will always produce accurate quotes and orders, aligning customer expectations with the capabilities of the factory. In addition, the configurator also made sales reps discover product capabilities and options they did not think were possible, providing a better product fit to customer’s needs and thereby increasing win-rates.

The new way of working also makes Conf Industries less vulnerable if key product expertise leaves the company, since the product portfolio is now expressed in the system rather than in the heads of individual product experts.
With Tacton CPQ taking care of the day-to-day business, the technical department is now free to focus on innovation and moving into new product areas and customer segments. This will help Conf Industries to grow in the future.

“Tacton CPQ is really a product that fits our production. […] So it is definitely the product that we must have and that we were so happy to implement, and we are so happy now to have with us. Because it helps us so much to reduce the stress of the company and help us definitely to have a growing perspective for the future.”

Flavio Ventura, CEO Conf Industries