frEvatec
- Switzerland
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Manufacturing
Evatec Streamlines Complex Sales Processes for High-Tech Manufacturing
Benefits
- Configurations that used to take hours now only take minutes with Experlogix CPQ. This dramatically reduces quoting time.
- Flexible configuration rules accommodate Evatec's product complexity and customization needs. This supports their technical requirements.
- Visualizations update in real-time during the quoting process, enhancing the customer experience. Sales can provide a visual representation of the configured product.
"When we were evaluating different CPQ tools, the Experlogix Design Center looked more suitable than other solutions."
Flavia Manz, Project Leader
Established in 2004, Evatec manufactures coating machines for producing thin films that enable many of the world’s most advanced technologies. While a significant amount of Evatec’s customers operate in the semiconductor industry, the company’s thin film know-how enables everything from the high-speed sensing and data processing required for autonomous driving to augmented reality technology in tomorrow’s smart glasses.
Evatec’s customers work with materials and devices that require coatings with precise physical qualities. For example, fingerprint sensors in mobile devices require coatings that can block or absorb higher wavelengths of light, while recognizing the wavelengths that our skin reflects; this is radically different from the types of coating needed for applications like virtual and mixed reality, where device battery life and image quality become much more important. The challenge is to deliver high-performance thin films without making production costs a barrier to new technologies entering mass market production.
Scalability also presents another key challenge for Evatec. The company already experienced dramatic growth over the last 20 years as it established its position as an industry leader, producing coatings and films for an increasingly diverse array of high-tech customers around the globe.
As Evatec scaled from 10 employees in 2004 to around 700 today, the company recognized that both its products and internal processes needed to be transformed to keep pace with the company’s growth.
Challenge
Evatec set out on a journey to implement a solution empowering its product marketing manager team with more efficient sales tools and higher quality data, reducing the need for manual processing with traditional spreadsheets and text documents. The company identified the need for a CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solution that could address a few core issues:
- Reduce the time it takes to create quotes.
- Create a consistent, transparent process that everyone in the organization could follow.
- Reduce errors
- Accelerate integration of new team members.
Solution
Evatec needed a solution that could handle the complexity of multiple product lines and regions, as well as numerous variations for each configuration — whilst still maintaining flexibility to meet the very precise needs of its customers. In addition to configuring orders for hardware, Evatec provides maintenance and other services for its machines, adding to the potential complexity of a complete order.
The solution would also need to support forecasting for procurement, global planning and supply chain teams, so that they could better project materials needs for suppliers
“It takes a lot of process and hardware knowledge to sell our products,” said Flavia Manz, project leader at Evatec. “With the help of Experlogix, we are building a centralized place where all this information is documented. For some of our products a product marketing manager can now start working in a new way by selecting a process solution that the customer needs in CPQ, and the system prompts them with appropriate hardware for the selected process.”
“With the help of Experlogix, we are building a centralized place where all this information is documented.”
Evatec began with a small-scale implementation, so they could migrate key data and build the appropriate business logic into CPQ. Over the course of a year, Evatec leveraged Experlogix CPQ’s intuitive Design Center to build configuration and pricing rules for three of its product lines.
“We have really complex products and processes,” said Manz. “When we were evaluating different CPQ tools, the Experlogix Design Center looked more suitable than other solutions. We were also able to get good support; the intuitive user experience and the trainings we received made it clear how to model configurations.”
Result
Evatec’s product marketing management team can now for the first time build full quotes leveraging CPQ from within the familiar Microsoft Dynamics 365 interface. Experlogix has also helped enhance the customer experience, enabling product visualizations throughout the configuration process. As different product modules are selected, the system automatically updates the associated image to provide a real-time visual representation of the customer’s configuration. Once a quote is complete, all important information, as well as the product visualization, can be saved to CRM.
Having better quality data, with clearer hardware configurations, will help Evatec make more accurate forecasts and coordinate with suppliers. It will also help Evatec offer value-add services like predictive maintenance more effectively. At the same time, product customizations and options are more easily configured and documented.
Thanks to Experlogix CPQ, Evatec is setting out on its journey transforming the quotation process, keeping up better with the company’s incredible growth while continuing to meet its customers’ high expectations for precision and quality. The transformation will not only make the sales process more efficient, but also more scalable — the knowledge embedded in the system helping new users to get started and deliver the high-quality proposals its customers expect right from the start with the transparency needed internally.
Evatec delivers manufacturing solutions for organizations that stand at the forefront of innovation in their sectors. Now, it’s building its sales processes to match.
