In this customer case, we are introducing Ufkes Greentec. A young and dynamic manufacturing company that builds extremely compact, but powerful wood chippers, stump grinders, and timber cranes. Ufkes Greentec operates widely in Europe and sells their machinery through an international dealer network. The goal of Ufkes Greentec was to eliminate all errors from their sales process and to build an online environment in which their dealers could configure their products.
In the video below, Piet Yntema tells you everything about Ufkes Greentec, their production process, and the benefits they experience from Elfsquad CPQ.
My name is Piet Yntema and I am manager at Ufkes Greentec. Our company was founded in 2004 and we currently have 60 people employed at Ufkes. We build machines for the wood processing industry, such as choppers and stump cutters. We do business in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, and England. We also have several dealers outside Europe. However, for the most part, our business mainly takes place in a radius of 500 kilometers around the Netherlands. In the beginning, we started by importing forage harvesters from America, but in America, choppers were built only to shred the wood. Since wood chips are worth a lot in Europe, we wanted to produce high-quality wood chips. Therefore, we had to make a lot of adjustments to the choppers here, which resulted in us deciding to start our own production of shredders in 2009. Up until 2004 we only imported, but since 2009 we have our own production line. In 2016, we opened our new production hall, which allowed us to have a clear division between service, repair, and the production of our machines. In 2019 we also founded our own company in Sauerland, Germany. From Germany, we are able to sell our machines. And offer services throughout all of Germany.
The difference between us and our competition is that we try to build our machines very compactly. The competition often works with multiple machines or develops larger machines, unlike us where we try to fit the same capacity into a smaller machine. Therefore, our machines are extremely flexible and can be used in villages as well as cities, which allows labor to be performed directly on site. Similar machines from other manufacturers are often limited to a certain type of location due to their size and lack of mobility. Our customers can start the labor immediately on-site where the trees are cut down. Currently, we offer seven different shredders with each 50 different accessories to choose from. On top of that, each accessory has approximately 20 different functions. Altogether there are many different possibilities because we offer a wide range of machines. With a standard machine package, we try to meet our customers’ wants and needs as much as possible to successfully deliver the final machine. Since we offer 50 different chippers with 50 different accessories, which as mentioned before have 20 different functions, we are able to use this wide range of products and accessories to develop the desired machine for every customer. Other manufacturers usually produce standard machines for the customer, where customers then have to make adjustments themselves or have it adjusted for them. Our advantage is that when the machine does not meet all the customer’s needs then we can produce a specific desired machine with all the standard parts.
We used to work with a fixed price per machine, but due to the many options that every machine has, this became quite complex for dealers, who normally don’t actually offer shredders with that many possible configurations. Often these traders ordered too many machines, too little, or a specific combination of accessories that were impossible to manufacture. CPQ software solves this problem automatically. When the dealer chooses a specific option, certain options within the combination are excluded. In the past dealers used to contact our headquarters to figure out why certain combinations were possible and why others were not or to ask whether combinations were even possible at all. Dealers are now able to set up a perfect quotation for the customers every time.
In the past, dealers often asked us: `We want to offer a machine, what can you supply? ` or ‘Do you think this quote is correct? ` The dealer then sent this to the customer, which raised questions like: `Is this also possible or is that also a possibility? ` Then the dealer had to contact the main office again and somewhere during this entire process an offer was made. What has changed is that the dealer can now generate a perfect quotation on-site for their client. The customer and dealer can now sit down together to discuss the different options and possible combinations, which translates into a correct quotation, without the help from us in Drachten. Back in the day, we had to re-engineer every new product because all machines were so different from each other. Nowadays, we only have to replace one module or certain standard parts, in order for us to produce the specific desired machine for each customer.
We compared different CPQ packages with each other and based on this Elfsquad came out as being the most user-friendly platform to use. We needed two weeks to put all our required data and product offerings in Elfsquad and after these two weeks, Elfsquad’s platform was directly ready to use and allowed us to make quotations immediately. What we experienced during trials with other CPQ providers was the complexity of programming all the different types of combinations. Currently, only A-dealers and some field services work with Elfsquad’s CPQ software and on top of that, we have made an online showroom available for our clients, so that they can directly configure the desired product on our website. After configuring their desired product on our website, they schedule a meeting with us. The greatest advantage for our sales team is that they don’t have to contact the headquarters anymore to make offers and generate quotations. The headquarters used to set up the quote on request of the dealer after which followed further negotiations.
Now, the dealer can immediately prepare a quote for the customer, which saves a lot of time because they no longer need to contact the headquarters to set up quotations for them. This allows them to work faster and most importantly leave behind an error-free quote with the customer. The biggest advantage for our dealers is that they do not need the headquarters anymore. In the past, the dealer needed a quote and had to contact the headquarters to ask whether a specific machine could be manufactured or not. This resulted in further negotiations about the different options, which could be included in the offer, but now the dealer can set up the right quote and directly discuss this with the customer. He can look the customer in the eye to see whether this is what the client needs, or if there is something else the customer wants. Altogether a lot of time is saved and the dealers can present an error-free quote directly to the customer. Before we started using Elfsquad’s CPQ software we often experienced problems, which included many errors in the quotations, and this negatively affected our production and quotation process. These errors resulted in us having to reach out to the dealer and the dealers having to communicate with the client to discuss certain possibilities within product combinations. Nowadays, everything is done correctly ranging from the quotation to the production process and errors within these processes do not occur anymore.
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.
