We at In Mind Cloud set a deep focus on research and development, which is why our software undergoes four product releases per year minimum. We are deeply committed to continuously improve our products and bring new and enhanced features to our customers.
With the new 1602 Release we are focusing on improvements in all major feature groups of the Configure-Price-Quote process: Configuration, Cost Calculation, Pricing and Proposal/Quote Generation.
The enhancements of this release are serving the specific requirements and industry use-cases of our customers in Manufacturing, Engineering and B2B Service industries.
We are proud to introduce the highlights of the 1602 Release to you in this article and have prepared four demo videos for illustration purpose.
1. Product Configuration
Our software is built to ease and automate the configuration process for sales representatives. With our new release, significant handling improvements have been made to enable an efficient product configuration process that saves time and ensures accuracy.
Introduction of Copy Feature*
With the new “Copy Quote” function all sales items in an old quote are copied to a new quote, which brings significant ease into the daily workflow of sales people. Closely related to this, the “Copy Sales Item” function allows for all sub line items to also be copied along with a parent line item within the same quote.
Sales Item Placement and Positioning
One crucial process step during the product/solution configuration is to position sales items either following a practical order (user choice) or pricing strategy (high to low priced). Furthermore, the new release allows the user to change the sales item parent or add a sub line item directly (in Cloud CPQ Express).
Sales Item and Product Images and Attachments
Sales reps often need to illustrate sales items or products with images or other attachments. With this release we introduce the feature to include attachments on sales item and product level. All images are displayed in the configuration page and are available in the proposal generation.
Video highlights:
The following video showcases these features in a demo scenario of a sales rep from an engineering company, who is configuring a titanium acceleration pedal for an underground loader. One of the main configuration challenges for sales people selling in the engineering or manufacturing industries are the large number of sales items and manufacturing processes they need to handle.
- copying of sales item whilst retaining its properties and sub line items
- renaming of sales items
- re-positioning of sales items
- attachment of multiple product images
2. Cost Calculation
Industries like manufacturing, precision engineering and high-tech often sell within tight margins, hence calculating costs accurately is one of the key business impacting factors. The accurate costing of products, components and services and the compliant optimization of margins towards profitability are mission critical tasks for sales people when creating a quote for a customer.
Introduction of Mass Update Feature*
We have made available a new view to first visualize the various parameters of the cost model in a fashion similar to an Excel sheet. In this view sales items are grouped by product type and all common attributes are shown. The sales rep can further update one or more items together making mass update possible.Video Highlights:The following video showcases these features in the engineering demo scenario as above. For sales reps in the engineering industry cost calculation is a time-consuming and error-prone process which is critical in regards to price determination and profitability calculations of a quote.
- Adding a manufacturing process to the Sales BOM via drag ´n drop
- Comprehensive configuration functionalities in the Costing View
- Mass update of attributes/costs for all OR for selected line items
- Mass changes in configuration
3. Pricing/Discounting
Our vision of making the sales process of our customers reasonable is incomplete without the product capability to increase their efficiency whilst guaranteeing accuracy, especially for tasks like pricing or respectively discounting. To facilitate this and also to support SAP Pricing, we have made available Document and Item Pricing (both coming from SAP ERP External Pricing and SAP SSC) in Cloud CPQ Express.
Quote Header Price Item View
With this release we enhanced the Pricing View with a Quote Level View and an Item Level View in order to provide a better overview for sales reps whilst pricing/discounting their quote. We now support to add price items for a Quote Header on a document level and also get this executed in SAP ERP via External Pricing approach.
Video Highlights:The following video showcases these features in a demo scenario of a sales rep from a B2B company, who is discounting a quote for servers, equipment and services. Applying discounts on quote and line item levels, he needs a clear overview of the final prices and discounts that he is offering to his customer.
- Discounting a quote on line-item level
- Applying quote discounts
- Reviewing discounts in the Pricing View
- in Quote Level View and Item Level View
4. Proposal/Quote Management and Generation
The 1602 Release also caters to the needs of sales people to generate proposals of different types, including different components and to export them in different formats.
Proposal Generation and Management
The new Proposal Generation feature supports custom additional report templates that can be used to generate cover pages, a cover letter, technical and commercial proposals. These templates can be merged and sequenced. Furthermore quote attachments, product description documents and any other PDF documents can be merged into a final proposal. With this release we are introducing a new view to manage the preferences and control over the mentioned functions and therewith provide a convenient workflow for the sales representative to select the templates and proposal parts he wants to download. The release also allows a custom selection of language in which the user wants to generate the proposal template.
Video Highlights:The following video showcases these features in a demo scenario of a sales rep from a B2B company, who is preparing a proposal for servers, equipment and services. Sales reps often work under unavoidable time constraints whilst creating proposals for their customers. Our software allows sales reps to edit, sequence and compile all required parts of a proposal and export it in a corporate design compliant way in a short time. The sales rep hereby can choose export formats such as PDF, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.
- Editing and reviewing of proposal details such as Quote Reference, Introduction Letter, Terms & Conditions in the Proposal Details
- Choosing from multiple proposal templates
- Merging and download of final proposal as PDF
- Download final proposal as editable Word document
These were the highlights of the 1602 Release, if you do have any questions referring our features, this particular update or our further capabilities, please drop us a comment or send us an email.
We at In Mind Cloud are proud to be contributing to our customer´s success via our reasonable software and are continuously working on further improvements for our customers.
*Feature not supported for SSC
About In Mind Cloud´s product Cloud CPQ Express:
Cloud CPQ Express is a generic enterprise level CPQ system built by In Mind Cloud for SAP Ecosystem. It has a ready set of features to run a company’s extended quotation management process in a very agile easy-to-use manner. It’s hosted on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform and allows customers to run their entire sales process on a single SAP platform from SAP CFC to SAP ERP. Find it in the SAP Store or on www.inmindcloud.com
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