At the M+E Forum on 16 September 2021, which focused on the topic of “Digitalization in production”, experts from the field explained how Manufacturing 4.0 can be implemented. In a total of five presentations, a holistic view from material procurement to sales was presented. The clear trend here is the cross-functional merging of different business and organizational areas.
The experts agreed that digitalization requires a holistic approach and thus offers the opportunity not only to transform business areas, but to revolutionize them.

Digital production requires digital distribution. Sales processes act as the starting point for downstream production processes. Sales, as the customer’s direct contact, operates as the first link in the chain and lays the foundation for which products are later produced.

Many companies with sophisticated products still have predominantly manual sales processes, which are often very time-consuming and tedious. It often takes weeks or even months from the customer’s first contact with the sales department to the final order being placed. Numerous iterations with the customer regarding the product specification, internal coordination with the technical department and pricing take up a lot of time. This manual process is prone to errors and, in the worst case, the product offered cannot be built at all. This is precisely where the SAE CPQ solution comes in: The platform bundles company data such as prices, texts, images and the set of rules and communicates bidirectionally with other systems such as CRM, ERP, PLM, PIM and CAD. Technical know-how can be scaled through the platform and is thus available worldwide around the clock, so that sales teams, dealers and subsidiaries & customers are perfectly supported and enabled to configure products correctly and create quotations. The data and technical knowledge can therefore be used across all sales channels. Consistency counts – from sales to production. Further information can be found here.