What Is a CPQ Tool?
CPQ stands for configure, price, quote. Many water and wastewater treatment companies that sell products and engineered systems use a CPQ tool to help streamline their inquiry to order (ITO) and manufacturing to order (MTO) processes. Engineering teams, and in some cases sales teams, utilize CPQ tools to help them select the right configuration of products for specific customer needs, and the tool then compiles that information into a basic proposal or set of technical documents, often with a price attached.
The CPQ Process
In the water industry, companies typically use a variety of Excel spreadsheets to manage the CPQ process.
In some cases they’ve built their own CPQ tools, often managed and kept under tight watch by engineering teams. As an example, an engineer at a membrane supplier might use a CPQ tool to input data relative to a particular treatment project, select a number of membrane elements, appropriately size a membrane tank, and compile cost information into a basic report for the commercial team to then utilize to prepare a proposal specific to that client. For most water OEM’s, a CPQ tool is housed within engineering and the interface is riddled with hundreds of input fields and requires intimate knowledge of specific treatment processes and systems to utilize.
Companies often find the engineering teams quickly becoming the bottleneck for getting high-quality, standard proposals to their customers… with the level of detail and SPEED 21st-century customers expect. Because sales reps aren’t able to access these tools or they are far too cumbersome to use, water and wastewater OEM’s lose deals or make more ‘no-go’ decisions on projects they would like to ‘go’ on, simply because their engineering teams don’t have capacity to generate as many proposals as required.
The Difference Between Water Treatment Equipment Proposal Software
This is where the Transcend Design Generator comes in. Transcend’s software accomplishes what traditional CPQ tools SHOULD do – alleviate bottlenecks in the proposal process for commercial teams – and also automates the preliminary engineering and decision-making that goes into selecting, sizing, and designing equipment in addition to creating high-quality, error-free proposals that match the look and feel of a typical proposal generated for a given client.
Why Transcend’s Software Is Better Than Traditional CPQ Tools
With Transcend software, commercial teams trying to develop opportunities who traditionally rely on internal application engineering (AE) teams to select, size, configure, and quote no longer are constrained by the capacity of their engineering teams – Transcend software is intelligent enough to automatically make the decisions the applications engineering teams typically do when it comes to selecting and sizing the proper equipment – meaning commercial teams simply need to input a limited number of client data (influent and effluent water quality) and let the software do the rest.
Get Started With Transcend Water Treatment Proposal Software Today
If you’re a salesperson or engineer at a water/wastewater company and would like to try it yourself, we are currently offering a free design run for anyone that signs up at the link here.
