Every manufacturing business uses a significant amount of business applications. Think ERP, CAD, CRM, PDM, PLM, and your Office packages. On top of this comes financial software, planning software, service software, et cetera. Many of these packages are rigidly built because they must be able process a large amount of data in a structured way. These transactional systems bring many advantages with them in the fields of security, data conformity, structure, and stability. But they are not exactly flexible, and this makes it difficult to respond to the rapidly changing customer needs.
For instance: a customer wants to start their search online and be completely aware of what is available in the market. The more you can realize this, the more the customer will lean towards your solution.
This creates a number of challenges, since you not only want your product to meet the customer’s demands, but also that the customer always sees a correct price and gets a fast followup. This means that you need to start generating data from the first contact with the customer. In a way that your following systems can be directly ‘fed’ relevant information. Only then will you guarantee a short time to market. And will you be able to gain insight in your customers’ purchasing behavior.
2-speed-architecture creates the integration between the ‘best of both worlds’. Specifically, this means that you get the opportunity to use the latest technology, based on your current business applications. Allowing you to, using smart tools, automate a big portion of your manual processes. Think integrations with dashboarding software such as Power BI, flexible CRM tools like Insightly, Hubspot or Pipedrive, an online configurator like Elfsquad, webshops, etc. This allows you to quickly respond to customer requests and you offer a personally tailored experience, all the while gathering data in your most important systems for a structured followup. The ultimate customer experience, linked to your IT. The best way to gain an advantage over your competition.
By connecting Next Generation Applications to your current business applications you not only get stronger software, but also much more value for your various users. For example: a salesman that wants to know in which region he can find high quotation values with a good chance of selling, so that he can tune his visits based on this data. Or a sales manager gains insight in all running quotations handled by dealers, so that he can quickly step in where necessary. On top of that, he also has insight in how dealers perform and can base commissions on that. Has a new product line been rolled out? You want to directly promote this through your online channels, without being dependent on manual actions carried out by dealers, for instance.
An end customer wants to be able to compose a product in their own time, and order it when it suits them. Consequently, this has to be produced directly and without error, with no surprises afterwards. That could mean that you need to be aware of planning and stock in a very early stage. This is only possible when you are able to seamlessly integrate the latest technology with your current business applications.
What could 2-speed-architecture look like for you? We will gladly show you through a number of our customer experiences. Then, we can look at how we make it applicable for you!
Elfsquad removes all worries from your pre-production process. With Elfsquad as backbone, we realize the digital factory that smart industries have been trying to find for so long. We do this through a product configurator, with integrated solutions for marketing, sales, and operations.
