Manufacturing companies should focus on service business competence?
This is a translation of an Variantum Offering Management article in Tulevaisuuden Suomi 2019.
Companies must take control of their offering lifecycle in order to ensure their competitiveness and profitability in the future.
To ensure their competitiveness in the future, companies must meet their customer needs more thoroughly by advancing from mere product sales to the next level in the evolution of offering management.
“Many companies have trouble getting to the second level of the evolution to begin with; they already struggle with service production. Sales departments, for example, are often unaware of which products have been sold to a customer. This makes cross-selling and upselling difficult, or they might require extensive inquiry on a regular basis,” states Kimmo Karhu; CEO in Variantum, a pioneer in product management and configuration.
Variantum is one of the few in its global field, who handle product data management, as well as sales and production configuration, all in the same system. With these solutions, organizations within a company from development to production and sales to maintenance services, get a shared view of the company’s offering.
“As a result, the company’s offering is more easily, automatically and efficiently within the customer’s reach. Meanwhile, the company can ensure that their pricing is profitable and their order-to-delivery process straightforward.”
With a sales configurator, a company can be certain of their product’s manufacturability. As a by-product, production configuration creates a digital product unit, which provides a basis for profitable maintenance and service business, since all product data is available in real-time.
Variantum configurators do not intend to replace ERP or CRM systems, but rather enhance their ability where required.
“It is worth remembering, that this shift is evolution, not a revolution. It means that the new and old systems can coexist until the market is ready to shift to a new era,” Karhu concludes.
Offering Management Evolution
Variantum is specialized in solving business needs with complex configurable products in engineering, sales, production, and maintenance & services.
We are a Finnish software company established 2005 and our mission is to help companies to serve their customers faster and error-free, empower product development and maintainability, to automate the offer-to-deliver process, and to provide unlimited product and price configurability.
Our product VariSuite is offered as a SaaS with open integrations to any business system. Together with our partners, we have customers from various industries over 50 000 end-users globally.
We enable companies to re-imagine their Offering Management.
