Industry 4.0 – CPQ software for industrial trucks (VNA)
Keyword: Sales 4.0?
Today’s industrial truck manufacturers employ highly qualified experts in the global field service to advise and analyze end customers. Due to the change to ever larger and increasingly technologized warehouses with the use of simple, free-moving industrial trucks through to completely process-integrated narrow-aisle trucks, the system consultant’s “belly drawer” is constantly being filled with additional products. So-called CRM and configuration tools are made available in order to maintain an overview.
CRM systems “manage” the system consultant’s customers and can be used to support the preparation of quotations. In addition, so-called configurators are used, which we encounter every day. Be it as a customer in a furniture store or on the Internet on one of the well-known car manufacturer websites.
When considering highly complex narrow-aisle vehicles, several factors must be taken into account by the “expert” when designing the vehicle:
The vehicle: Should it be a pure order picking vehicle, a so-called “combi stacker” or a man-down device?
The type of guidance: Does the customer require a rail-guided or inductive guided vehicle? Or was a free-moving order picker requested?
The warehouse/building data: How wide are the aisles? How high are the doors under which the driver may still have to drive? How high is the building? How many kilograms need to be lifted to what storage height?
The load: Which loading equipment does the customer use? Does he possibly have different loading aids, for example a Euro pallet, a pallet cage and/or an industrial pallet?
In addition to the factors mentioned above, there are other factors that come into play, such as the calculation of residual carrying capacities and time differences due to countries on the other side of the world. This makes it difficult to contact the specialist departments in the individual production plants and is not efficient in today’s world. The customer expects a high-quality quotation with all details promptly from all suppliers.
How does the system consultant ensure the buildability and plausibility of the inductive-guided combi stacker he is offering fits into the warehouse and that the residual load capacities have been calculated correctly? How will the current buzzword “Industry 4.0” soon become a new buzzword: “Distribution 4.0”?
Example of a real query
SAE GmbH, a software manufacturer and specialist in variant data management with over 20 years of SAP experience, has the solution approach – using a real customer inquiry as an example.
The initial situation: SAE GmbH was selected to transfer the entire “knowledge” of the development and technology departments to the notebooks and tablets of the sales colleagues working worldwide.
The requirement was clearly formulated: “No separate maintenance of existing procedures, dependencies and calculations in another system, complete offline and online availability.” This is the only way to ensure that all changes in the variant management of industrial trucks remain under the control of the manufacturer’s development department. There is no need to maintain or match data in marketing or product management.
The challenge: the complexity of a narrow-aisle forklift truck with more than a billion possible combinations. Here, buildability in the factory and plausibility on site at the end customer must be 100% guaranteed. This can only be achieved if the existing data is not changed.
For reasons of complexity, sovereignty always lies with the development engineers. The dependencies, procedures and dependencies defined there can be easily loaded into the SAE variant data management platform using the standard “SAE Sales Interface” and immediately made available online or offline to global sales. Additional requirements in this project were the integration of a product finder, an interface to the existing CRM system and the automatic transfer of global orders back to the SAP ECC or S4H system of the order centers in the respective production plants.
Procedure of the project
SAE’s quotation and configuration system was used. The requirement was that SAE had to prove within a few days that the existing data could be read into the SAE system and that the SAE configurator and the SAE product finder were functional within a very short time. SAE offers this approach to all customers to ensure that projects are implemented successfully straight away. The company is convinced that this is the most honest and serious way to make it easier for customers to enter into a long-term partnership.
SAE implemented all of the customer’s specifications within a very short time. Every user of the SAE quotation and configuration system can “find” and then configure a highly complex narrow-aisle truck within two minutes using the implemented product finder. The user is guided through the system, enters six to eight so-called must-have features and immediately receives the right truck, including load capacity calculations and dimensions. SAE then “inherits” the product finder class into the vehicle configuration and the user then clicks on the desired options that their customer requires. However, only options that are actually available for the “found” vehicle are displayed here. The topic of Sales 4.0 is increasingly coming into focus due to practical examples like this. Using this developed SAE interface, every system consultant can immediately jump from the CRM to the product finder, “find” the corresponding industrial truck and then start with the actual configuration. Process reliability – from the quotation phase to the order and subsequent order in the production plant – is 100 percent guaranteed.
Thanks to this implemented project, the customer has a quotation/configuration software in use worldwide with which any system consultant can immediately quote even the most complex industrial trucks in over 20 different languages within two minutes. All quotations contain full buildability and plausibility, there are no queries or – in the worst case – delivery of expensive narrow-aisle vehicles that cannot be used by the customer. The customers’ consultants can work offline and online and have more than doubled their order intake in the narrow-aisle vehicle sector alone within four years.
Digitalization in sales with SAE CPQ
SAE has developed an outstanding solution for high-end sales. The sae interactive motion engine offers fully moving 3D visualizations that can be evaluated interactively in the configurator or in the visualization. This means that the product evaluation can be changed and carried out either in the model in the configurator or alternately. For example, entire plant systems or hall plans can be created by the sales department. No expert knowledge such as design or product know-how is required.
The highlights are the fully mobile models, so that the function and collision check also takes place automatically. The digital twin is fully web-enabled, contains no design data (data security in global sales) and is easy to operate via the guided configuration or interactively in the model. The extremely short project realization time is outstanding. The customer gives SAE his design data and within one working day he can use his model in the “interactive motion engine” in sales.
