Transforming Sales in the Precision Engineering Industry

Posted by Sabine Kempe on Oct 1, 2019 7:21:42 AM
Sabine Kempe
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A highly competitive market meeting massive engineering and development efforts. Sounds like the perfect recipe for tight margins in a high-pressure business environment. How can companies in the Manufacturing Services and Precision Engineering industry cope? And even more: How can they uncover agility and efficiency to unlock their growth potential?

To find the answer, we took a deep dive with our customer, Interplex. Interplex is a leading provider of high precision parts used in automotive, communication, household appliances, automation, medicals, and electrical circuit control systems. Their goal is to provide the highest quality, volume-appropriate production yields, all while maintaining maximum cost-efficiency

Small Parts, Big Engineering Efforts

The nature of this business involves massive engineering and development efforts. Difficulties stemming from multiple plants also added to Interplex's challenges.

 


Read how our customer was able to overcome their sales challenges in our success story "Interplex transforms their sales with In Mind Cloud."


 

Disparate RFQ procedures, high error rates in project costing, together with long cycle times, and lack of transparency required for accurate forecasting, were just some of the issues that led Interplex to rethink their sales processes:

“Previously it required a lot of templates, diagrams and spreadsheets, combined with a high manpower effort to consolidate details for any kind of sales reporting and forecasting. But in our industry, accurate on-the-spot reports are vital to make fast and informed decisions,” stated our customer's Project Manager.

The prospect of being able to identify and pursue initiatives that can deliver competitive advantage in the future was a pivotal argument for Interplex.

The Sales Transformation Journey

With increasing global competition and the strategic goal to become a leading multi-technological solutions provider, Interplex decided to work with us on transforming their sales. Another motivator to embark on this journey was to ensure higher satisfaction rates for their long-term customers. With tight margins in this industry, an exceptional customer experience is key to winning the competition.

The solution for Interplex included the In Mind Cloud Digital Sales Platform modules best suited to their needs. The modules that showed exceptional results were: Sales Simplification, Sales Optimization, and Engineering Sales with Configure Price Quote (CPQ) functionality, all fully integrated into their backend, SAP ERP. 

Functions and features in focus were:

  • Fast and unified costing for specialized products
  • Manufacturing simulations, global cost control, and collaboration effectiveness
  • Engineering features empowering a speedy time-to-market at a lowered cost of sales
  • Sales management and analytics for fast and informed business decisions and prioritization

Interplex Sales Simplification for precision engineering industry

The Results: True Mass Customization For Agile Business Growth

We established a single source of truth for our customer’s most valuable engineering and sales data to sustain their goal of providing true mass customizationSome of the most visible results were a leaner supply chain with a smooth data flow between Interplex's entire business--from factories, to sales, and to their customers.

“The accuracy of the quote for us is a critical factor in our business success. For example, the cost calculation of stamping and molding tools for production also includes wear evaluations and amortisation rates which shows the complexity of our profitability targets," states the Quotation Manager of our customer.

Digitizing and automating a multitude of crucial pre-project tasks, such as technical assessments from raw material calculations, to production process analysis is the key to the highest levels of accuracy--and ultimately profitability in precision engineering businesses like Interplex's.

The support of gross profit calculations--from things as granular as cost-per-item to entire project win-loss and profit-margin analytics--enable the company to see if a project is profitable and which features have the most potential. 

Furthermore, making the vast amount of data available to forecast customer movements and buying behavior is a huge competitive advantage.


In Mind Cloud is a leading provider of manufacturing sales solutions for the precision engineering industry. Download our success story to find out how our solution was able to help transform Interplex's manufacturing sales processes, and help them take the lead in their industry. 

Download Customer Success Story
Sabine Kempe

Written by Sabine Kempe

Sabine - a digital enthusiast at heart, she is dedicated to matching the challenges of manufacturing businesses with the opportunities of a digitalized world.

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