When producing goods and services, there are many phases: engineering, sales, manufacturing and after-sales or maintenance. Companies need different systems for different process phases to be able to create, edit, find and collect data to produce the end-result. It may well happen that the people responsible for these different process phases are looking for information from different data sources. This may cause slowness or errors in production, double work in every phase, delays in sales, bad customer experience in customer service – the list is endless.
Scattered data causes delays
Especially in manufacturing companies the need for various systems is enormous. As the goods to be produced consist of many parts and components, and the number of product variations can be large, it is very important that the systems are well integrated, and data can be found easily and used systematically - and that it’s up to date and you can rely on it.
The systems a company may have for these processes can be enterprise resource planning (ERP), various design tools e.g. computer-aided design (CAD), customer relationship management (CRM), configure-price-quote (CPQ), product data management (PDM) or document management (DM) systems to name a few.
Very often the information is gathered separately from these systems by each part of the organization which makes everybody’s work slow and inefficient, as e.g. the sales department could be using product information differently from production.
A common data source enables efficiency
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These systems help to organize the relevant data into a unified form so that it can be used in the same format via a common source by different parts of the organization. Therefore, all organizations and teams can utilize the shared and common data source for their exact needs: e.g. sales will see correct information in sellable way and maintenance will know exactly what was shipped to the customer even if the product model has changed multiple times ever since!
Utilizing a common data source will impact all process phases making them faster and more efficient. This way all departments and members of the organization can utilize the same data and knowledge. All processes from design-to-order (DTO), engineer to order (ETO), configure-to-order (CTO) are more easily managed and the whole go-to-market process will get quicker. As all knowledge, models and designs are based on the same source and utilized in a commonly agreed way, the quality of the end products and services will be better and delivery times will speed up. In the end the customer satisfaction will increase which usually has a positive impact on turnover, market share and business development.
VariSuite-software by Variantum is an Offering Management system that combines product development, configure-price-quote, order-to-manufacture and installed base processes and functionalities. With VariSuite you enhance processes and can achieve results quickly regardless of your product or industry.