Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, a division of Shimadzu Corporation, manufactures analytical instruments indispensable for research, development, and quality control. The company replaced its legacy quoting application used in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, with Powertrak CPQ to simplify and accelerate processes for creating, managing, and configuring complex kits used in sales quotes.
Shimadzu's previous quoting system was rigid and had an 'all or nothing' security structure. One mistake and its whole system could be corrupted. This created an internal bottleneck as IT had to be involved in the implementation of any constraints or rules.
Additionally, its legacy system forced all product kits to either have the same basic structure or create multiple system instances to allow more autonomy. Maintaining twenty-plus instances in this system would be incredibly inefficient and significantly increase IT overhead. Its products have differing structural and organizational kit needs, being forced into one 'template' could no longer work for Shimadzu.
With a wide array of products and many complex kit combinations, the company recognized there was a significant learning curve for new sales staff to retain all of the interdependencies of parts necessary for accurate quoting due to its cumbersome and inefficient sales quoting application.
Seeking to improve inefficiencies while avoiding a resource-draining path of custom development, Shimadzu Scientific Instruments conducted an extensive evaluation for a flexible, robust, yet user-friendly quoting solution to simplify its complex configurations.
Solution
The Shimadzu Scientific Instruments' team did a comparative analysis of Configure-Price-Quote vendors that they had either researched, were referred to, or met at Microsoft Convergence.
The team asked vendors to demonstrate kit autonomy, kit-specific security, and validate how rules prevent quoting mistakes such as incompatible components.
Only two vendors met its standards for functionality, flexibility, scalability, licensing, and cost to implement and maintain.
Shimadzu Scientific Instruments selected Axonom's Powertrak solution for its immediate sales quoting need as well as long-term strategies with the platform.
Powertrak not only gives us control to create kits and execute sales quotes more efficiently and accurately, but its robustness allows us to apply multiple quotes, that may include multiple product kits, to any given opportunity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and forecast one or more quotes for pipeline management. This is a powerful benefit as we become less dependent on IT's input and approval for kit configurations, move toward product management and sales independence, and increase the accuracy of our reporting and forecasting. -Karen Sasaki, manager of information technology at Shimadzu Scientific Instruments
Results
Powertrak provides Shimadzu Scientific Instruments with a robust sales quoting platform to better serve its customers by empowering product management with full control of kit design, ensuring accurate pricing and product combinations; leading to a reduction in quoting errors and significantly less dependency on IT support.
In addition, Powertrak enriches Shimadzu Scientific Instruments' product management and sales quoting experience by simplifying the complexity, ensuring accuracy, increasing confidence, and speeding the quotation time. The next phase of the project is to extend the same quoting and ordering experience out to its distributor channel via Powertrak Partner Portal.
Click here to read the Powertrak CPQ Instrumental in Shimadzu’s Accurate Quote Configurations press release.
View Demos Request Information