encoway CPQ is a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution designed for sales processes in industries selling highly configurable products. That includes mechanical and plant engineering, component manufacturing, building elements, and medical devices. Within the app, seamless integration between encoway CPQ Sales, Showroom, and Studio enables sales teams to configure complex products accurately, generate error-free quotations swiftly, and provide customers with interactive product experiences.
The platform’s modular design allows for seamless integration into existing CRM and ERP systems, ensuring consistent data across all channels. Features like guided selling and 3D visualization help sales reps navigate intricate product configurations, leading to improved efficiency and customer satisfaction. Vendors can even use it to create B2C configurators and integrate them into their websites, so customers can build products right on the vendor’s site. And encoway CPQ Studio offers an intuitive environment for maintaining product data and logic, facilitating efficient data management and import from other systems.
Why this product is good
Positives of encoway CPQ Software
Product Details
What is encoway CPQ?
encoway is a product configurator and quoting software designed for B2B manufacturing. It allows sales teams to configure complex products, show customers what they’re purchasing, generate error-free quotes, and deliver interactive buying experiences.
Its defining features are:
- Guided selling
- Multichannel sales support
- 2D/3D visualization and augmented reality
- Centralized product data management with CPQ Studio
- CRM, ERP, and PIM integration
- Green configuration
- Business intelligence and analytics
Guided selling: Encoway helps sales teams understand customer needs by asking the right questions and auto-translating them into optimal solutions. Its logic ensures only feasible, technically correct products are created. The system automatically presents upselling and cross-selling opportunities, including product innovations, premium options, and add-ons. So, even sales staff with less technical experience can sell effectively.
Multichannel sales support: encoway CPQ Showroom lets you integrate a product configurator on your website, dealer portals, and even trade fairs. This means you can showcase all your product variants across every sales channel without solely relying on sales professionals or worrying about inconsistencies from one partner to the next. It also means you can broaden your market reach and offer B2C-like ecommerce experiences, even for complex products.
2D/3D visualization and augmented reality: Customers and sales reps can experience your products with 2D/3D visualization or place them right in the room using augmented reality. The 3D model adjusts in real time based on selected properties like color, size, and material. And users can test to see how a new machine fits next to existing ones, whether certain dimensions are possible, or whether a certain material will work with their current environment.
Centralized product data management with CPQ Studio: CPQ Studio is the centralized environment for building product logic and maintaining product data. It starts with simple if-then logic and drag-and-drop interfaces, but scales to complex calculations and external library connections. You can also manage text, media, multilingual content, and technical data within the modular, object-oriented sales system. Intuitive tools like a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor and customizable product structure trees make setup easy. You can manage prices by region and control product visibility for specific sales teams. And functions for mass data maintenance simplify bulk updates.
CRM, ERP, and PIM integration: You can seamlessly integrate with CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce Sales Cloud, so information about customers, sales pipelines, and orders flows back and forth. ERP integration facilitates automated order processing and logistics, and the platform offers special features for SAP Variant Configuration. And PIM integration centralizes product data management, so you can keep track of all the information needed to create accurate quotes.
Green configuration: encoway CPQ incorporates sustainability aspects into the configuration process, allowing customers to select environmentally friendly product options that meet their needs. For instance, when you configure a machine, you’ll instantly receive a quote and parts list and be able to view its energy consumption, including water, electricity, and other resource usage. You can compare this with alternative configurations to find the most sustainable variant of your desired product.
Business intelligence and analytics: The encoway CPQ BI Connector uses a scalable 3-tier architecture to process data from quotations, queries, and configurations, then displays it in Kibana. It can integrate with other BI systems, including data from encoway CPQ Sales, CPQ Showroom, and project-specific extensions. From there, you’ll have access to everything from trends to customer behavior, allowing you to make data-driven decisions that will improve sales and drive business growth.
What are the advantages of using encoway CPQ?
encoway CPQ Benefits
Using encoway CPQ opens contract manufacturers to several essential benefits. Its most promising include:
- Faster, more informed customer decision-making thanks to visual configuration and guided selling.
- Shorter time-to-quote and fewer errors in the sales process through automation in the configuration, pricing, and quoting process.
- Consistent and error-free product configurations across sales channels, including partner networks.
- Fast and transparent quotation process, resulting in high-quality quotes that meet customer requirements.
- Increased customer satisfaction through personalized product offerings and better service speed.
- Better insights into product configurations and customer preferences, allowing for more accurate forecasting and strategic planning.
- Improved cross-selling and upselling opportunities through customization options and guided selling.
- Simplified negotiations with version control and automated pricing calculations.
What industries are best suited for this solution?
encoway CPQ for Industries
encoway CPQ primarily addresses the challenges in B2B manufacturing industries that deal with highly configurable products and large product libraries. That includes mechanical and plant engineering companies, equipment and apparatus manufacturers, and bix-box retailers with complex distribution networks.
Mechanical and plant engineering companies
Efficient price calculation: By digitizing various types of offers, including engineer-to-order (ETO), configure-to-order (CTO), and assemble-to-order (ATO), encoway CPQ streamlines the quotation process, enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Integration of CPQ and PLM systems: The combination of CPQ and product lifecycle management (PLM) systems streamlines internal processes like order handling, production planning, and after-sales services. It also leads to a significant reduction in the variety of parts within modular product systems, leading to cost savings and improved product management.
Guided selling with interactive visualization: The product configurator provides guided selling features and visualizes complex ETO products for sellers and engineers. Working together, they can transform customer requirements into concrete solutions quickly and accurately, then test them in an AR environment before spending any money on production.
Equipment and apparatus manufacturers
Flexible configuration for dealers and end users: encoway CPQ enables equipment manufacturers to provide intelligent configuration tools that allow both dealers and end customers to customize complex equipment systems. This enhances user engagement and ensures accurate product specifications, reducing errors and streamlining the sales process.
Electronic product catalog: Features like hierarchies, combinable filters, and full-text search, as well as intelligent search and filtering, make it easy for users to find the ideal solution for their needs. When manufacturers are working with a diverse range of products and options, this kind of search functionality makes it easy to sift through complex data and find the right items quickly.
Modular, object-oriented product modeling: encoway CPQ uses a modular, object-oriented approach to product modeling. This means that new product variants can be easily created by combining existing modules, reducing the complexity of design and production processes. This also leads to faster time-to-market for equipment, which may be customized but still follow baseline designs.
Big-box retail
Customer-facing configuration engine: In addition to the sales configurator, retailers with B2C operations can integrate encoway’s software into their websites. That way, individual customers can order things like custom picture frames, made-to-measure blinds, or cut-to-size sheet metal without having to physically walk into the store or test it out in person.
Interconnected sales channels: With encoway CPQ, all sales channels are integrated into one centralized system. This ensures consistency across different store locations, distribution partners, and online retail platforms and facilitates a seamless customer experience.
Multilingual support: For multinational retailers and distributors (like those operating all across the EU), encoway CPQ supports multiple languages. This means that even with a diverse customer base, everyone can easily configure and order your products within your system, and they can do it in their native language.
Prices
encoway CPQ Pricing
As of now, encoway does not publicly disclose specific pricing information for their CPQ solutions. The cost of implementing encoway CPQ varies significantly based on the size of your company, the complexity of your product configurations, how many users you have, and the specific features you need.
To obtain detailed pricing tailored to your organization’s needs, reach out to encoway’s sales team directly.
Is there anyone else out there?
Competitors and Alternatives to encoway CPQ
In the manufacturing CPQ space, there are several competitors to encoway. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, which is why it’s important to evaluate your options carefully to find the best fit for your business. Depending on how complicated your product configuration process is and your company’s specific needs, you may find that one of these three alternatives better suits your organization.
Top 3 encoway CPQ Alternatives
PROS CPQ
PROS Smart CPQ leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide dynamic pricing and personalized offers. Like encoway, it’s designed to handle extensive product catalogs, complex configurations, visualizations, and multichannel B2B selling environments. But its AI engine includes churn forecasting algorithms, cluster algorithms (for deal scoring), and predictive pricing algorithms to optimize prices for every buyer in real time. For that reason, it’s the better option if your business operates on a large scale with complex pricing models and requires AI-driven pricing optimization.
Vendavo CPQ
Vendavo CPQ is an intelligent quoting system built for enterprise B2B sales teams. Similar to encoway, it has a powerful rules engine and visual configuration capabilities for complex ETO products. However, it also features end-to-end pricing and sales support capabilities, from AI-powered list price setting to rebate accruals and payment tracking, providing a holistic approach to revenue management. It also offers tailor-made solutions for its supported industries, like its healthcare, medical device, and pharmaceutical distribution platform, which makes it easy for sellers, manufacturers, and distributors to navigate the legal and regulatory restrictions specific to their markets. If revenue management or compliance features are high on the priority list, Vendavo might be a better choice.
Infor CPQ
Infor CPQ is another top contender if you want to harness the power of CPQ in manufacturing. The best thing about it is it seamlessly integrates with other Infor products, like Infor CRM and ERP systems, and Birst®, its own BI and analytics platform. This gives you an otherwise impossible level of consistency across business processes and data management. It also supports CAD drawings and ecommerce solutions, meaning your engineering team can draw their products in CAD and CPQ can automatically populate the bill of materials (BOM) with relevant components, further streamlining your sales process. If you’re a CAD-heavy organization and/or value the benefits of a consolidated tech stack, Infor’s product suite has what you’re looking for.
FAQs
Common Questions and Answers
The three components of encoway’s CPQ solution are CPQ Sales (the rep-facing product and quote configurator), CPQ Showroom (the customer-facing product and quote configurator), and CPQ Studio (the customizable rules engine that powers the configurators and stores product data).
encoway CPQ supports a fully-integrated standard inferface with SAP ERP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, and Salesforce Sales Cloud.
By combining SAP with encoway CPQ, businesses achieve seamless integration between sales and manufacturing processes, enhancing efficiency across all areas. And encoway CPQ Sales works natively with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce CRM, allowing users to manage configuration and pricing within their familiar CRM environment.
Andrew is a professional copywriter with expertise in creating content focused on business-to-business (B2B) software. He conducts research and produces articles that provide valuable insights and information to his readers.
