OVERVIEW
Following a rich history of innovation, Manitou has become the world leader in rough-terrain forklift trucks by pursuing a strategy that each truck should be customizable to meet the exact requirements of every customer.
Manitou is a global company with 17 subsidiaries doing business in more than
140 countries. It has developed a broad line of lift trucks, compact loaders and aerial access platforms.
Manitou deployed PROS Smart CPQ to optimize complex selling and ordering processes for its sales channels worldwide.
PROS Smart CPQ is used by Manitou field sales, dealers and order administration to manage customers and contacts, to select products from an electronic catalog, to configure and place orders, and to ensure complete order accuracy and real-time sales follow-up.
CHALLENGE
Manitou’s business includes complex configureto-order products, 17 subsidiary companies, 80 field sales representatives, and more than 1,400 dealers around the world. Manitou wanted to optimize its sales processes to overcome several challenges:
- Lack of visibility into dealers’ order pipelines.
- High error rates in quotes and orders.
- Frequent back and forth between sales and engineering to validate configurations.
- Difficulty and delay with communicating product changes to the field.
SOLUTION
PROS Smart CPQ is used by Manitou field sales, dealers and order administration to manage customers and contacts, to select products from an electronic catalog, to configure and place orders, and to ensure complete order accuracy and real-time sales follow-up.
Field sales, dealers and order administration all use PROS Smart CPQ to better manage the sales process. Manitou’s sales reps use the solution to interact with their indirect dealer network and capture accurate opportunity and order statistics coming from the channel.
Dealers have online access to the entire Manitou catalog to research and download technical product information, configure products, obtain dealer-negotiated purchase prices, and place orders that are 100% accurate. Moreover, PROS Smart CPQ is integrated with other Manitou information systems to provide dealers with self-service access to order status and account balances.
Lastly, Manitou’s sales teams across the globe use PROS Smart CPQ to take orders for configurable products. Seamless integration with Manitou’s ERP system eliminates errors and reduces orderto-production cycle times, as PROS Smart CPQ takes each customized order and automatically generates accurate bills-of-materials, routings and technical data sheets.
RESULTS
Manitou’s former paper catalog was bulky and difficult to navigate, which made it hard for salespeople to take orders without technical assistance. The implementation of PROS Smart CPQ as a common selling and ordering solution for sales teams and dealers produced many concrete results. The average time to configure and place an order was reduced from 30 days to 1 day.
With PROS Smart CPQ, the catalog is electronic and always up to date, eliminating configuration and pricing errors. Manitou is able to distribute its catalog to all sales channels in a consistent and uniform manner. With PROS Smart CPQ, Manitou has also increased the average revenue of each order by automatically providing upselling and cross-selling options to dealer sales reps.
More than 70% of dealer orders are now entered through the online dealer portal embedded with PROS Smart CPQ. This eliminated the manual processing of most orders and significantly reduced sales costs, resulting in a direct positive impact on company revenue and margins. Going forward, Manitou will also allow its dealers to purchase services, such as extended warranties, over the web.