Author Archives: Sabine Kempe

First things first, we are big fans of the Novus CPQ Podcast. Frank Sohn, CEO of Novus CPQ established this format to bring valuable knowledge and industry insights about all things Configure-Price-Quote related to his audience. 

Surpassing the United States in 2010, China’s manufacturing sector is now the largest in the world, with a total global Manufacturing Value Added (MVA) of USD 3.25 trillion in 2016, according to the World Bank.

China's government has committed to convert from a "high growth" to a "high quality growth" nation cemented in the 13th Five-Year-Plan. So how does this ambitious goal translate into the transformation of China's diverse manufacturing industry? Following our previous article on China's digitalization, let's have a look at the nation's digital upgrade plan for manufacturing - the "Made in China 2025" initiative.

Until recently China has been tagged with economic recession factors such as regional disparities, an aging population, declining heavy-industrial sectors, bursting property bubbles, growth in debt levels, and considerable environmental issues. So how comes, it is now slightly ahead of its goal to double GDP between 2010 and 2020? President Xi's ambition to make China a “moderately prosperous country" is right on track and the country enters 2018 with robust economic-growth momentum. In this post, I want to retrace China's path to it's massive growth unlocked by a combination of several factors, one of which is the "Digital China" agenda.

"With Cloud CPQ Express, Manufacturing Sales is a Piece of Cake (Almost)"

Recently we had the honor of being featured by SAP via an interview with our CEO, Dr. Christian Cuske.

It is our comittment to build a CPQ for manufacturing industries with maximum benefits especially for these industries. With a new release every quarter, our software is constantly being improved, we are adding roadmap features as well as customer inspired enhancements and UI improvements.

Manufacturers today are facing several challenges around the revenue generating unit of their business: Sales. When your sales team’s job includes to calculate production costs, configure the right solution out of a million options and compile Bills of Material extending hundreds of posts, sales has transformed from a number into a data game.

 With the 1708 release, "Cloud CPQ Express" has become more robust and feature rich for manufacturing industries. We are dedicated in filling the gaps in features that are necessary for manufacturing and are not served by any other CPQ tool in the market. Additionally, we aim to deliver a system in which each feature is self-administrable from the system itself.

CPQ - Configure Price Quote software - can be intensely beneficial to a sales team. The automation factor in quoting and proposal generation does not only save time, but helps cut down on costs of sales. Besides efficiency, a CPQ solution increases quote accuracy ensuring the profitability of quotes, especially for margin sensitive businesses. Certainly, these benefits are tremendous. But  what really gives a CPQ the strength to transform the sales of a company is its ability to span front and back office.

In part 1 of this blog series, we already indentified 5 of the key indicators that your manufacturing business will benefit from sales automation in the form of a  Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software.

The first set of questions that CEOs and business managers should ask themselves were:

1. Does the complexity of product configurations affect your margins?

2. Is pricing and product information from your ERP always available to sales? 

3. Do your sales teams make costing and pricing errors? 

4. Are your approval regulations increasing the length of the sales cycle? 

5. Are your margins eaten up by real production costs later?

Businesses in manufacturing industries offering complex products or services to their customers often have 3 problems in common: 

1. The sales process is lengthy
2. The complexity of the products or solutions offered, extends to the sales process itself 
3. Price calculations are difficult but require 100% accuracy due to slim margins

Interview with Dr. Christian Cuske, CEO of In Mind Cloud

Recently we explored the advantages of using a Cloud CPQ and CRM for manufacturing businesses. We identified cost-effectiveness, scalability, enhanced collaboration and a more efficient way of processing a company’s data as the main advantages of a cloud solution.

Today we will take a closer look at the underlying technology platform of a cloud solution, specifically, the SAP Cloud Platform (SAP CP). Dr. Christian Cuske, In Mind Cloud’s co-founder and CEO will give us more insights on why the company built their software on this platform and how In Mind Cloud's customers benefit from that choice.

The Opening Keynote of SAPPHIRE NOW 2017 was full of enthusiasm and demonstrations that prove SAP's history in bringing radical change into the world will be continued in the age of digital transformation.