Cincom Systems, Inc. (www.cincom.com), a privately-held, Cincinnati, OH based provider of software solutions and services primarily to complex manufacturers, continues with perfecting its knowledge systems for sales, and customer relationship management (CRM). In September, the company announced the availability of its new CRM Solution for Complex Manufacturers. With some of its customers reportedly already asserting proposal times cut from five days to 15 minutes, product time-to-market reductions of as much as 70%, and 15% increases in business win rates, Cincom believes the new offering is arriving just in time for this market segment.
Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions has spanned nearly four decades as a provider of solutions for manufacturers, and has always strived to provide its customers an evolutionary path through major technological changes, enabling them to keep pace without major disruption of their business. In recent years, Cincom has especially carved out expertise to satisfy the specific requirements of the complex manufacturing industry. Its knowledge of complex manufacturing has often ensured delivery of functional products bundled with rapid implementation resulting in one of the fastest Return-on-Investment (ROI) and one of the best customer service & support in the industry segment.
Complex manufacturers produce products that are of high variation, have complex features and options, and vary in end-user configuration. They consequently invest significant dollars in product design and have lengthy sales and manufacturing business processes, often requiring collaboration between the customer, sales representatives, and critical back-office experts. To that end, Cincom's CRM for Complex Manufacturers facilitates the real-time transfer of information and complex product knowledge for collaboration across the extended enterprise, and should especially be suited to organizations that seek to maintain complex selling relationships, such as businesses whose sales functions rely on channel partnerships or a distributed sales force. The solution is comprised of three components: Cincom's Knowledge Builder, Cincom's Sales Configurator, and Cincom's e-Channel. Purchased individually or as a total solution, the new Cincom CRM components were devised to provide the initial step for complex manufacturers who want to move their product life cycles closer to a mass customization model, in the quest for the ultimate combination of "custom made" and "mass production."
Cincom's Knowledge Builder was devised to simplify the most complex selling, while accelerating the sales cycle, broadening sales channels, and lowering the cost to sell. To that end, a manual process that took anywhere from a day to several days can now reportedly be accomplished in about one minute with the appropriate use of Knowledge Builder. Cincom's Knowledge Management (KM) technology provides the "intelligence" required to support the mass customization of products and services at the point of sale (POS). By providing intuitive rule creation and maintenance in an enterprise environment, companies should quickly and cost-effectively capture critical sales, engineering, and manufacturing knowledge for deployment across sales channels.
When products or services present customers with a complex set of choices, or where product components and pricing elements are subject to rapid change, requiring sales teams to have access to up-to-date configuration and pricing information, the Cincom CRM Solution for Complex Manufacturers comes into the picture to enable sales people and partners to establish smart sales processes worldwide. The e-Channel product enables companies with complex products and services to capture and distribute critical sale and product configuration knowledge across all sales channels. It supports direct and indirect sales channels, and it is a comprehensive interactive selling system for both networked and mobile users. The e-Channel Desktop module permits each sales agent to organize customer, product, pricing, and external information so that it is immediately accessible by anyone involved in the sales opportunity.
One of the most recent endorsements of the offering came in October, when TAFA, Inc., a Praxair Surface Technologies Company, announced it has completed the development phase of a new systems estimator based on Cincom Systems' Knowledge Builder application. The web-based program allows the user to create test configurations of automated thermal spray processing systems, and produce budgetary cost estimates to produce it, whereby the turnaround time to produce estimates has been slashed dramatically. Other notable recent customers of a similar profile have been Pellerin Milnor Corporation, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., American Power Conversion (APC), Greenheck Fan Corporation and Thyssen Aufzge Group.
This is Part One of a two-part analysis of recent Cincom news.
Part Two will detail the Challenges Cincom faces and make User Recommendations.
Market Impact
Despite current seemingly never-ending difficult economic times, the growth of complex contract-based manufacturing has still continued. This expansion has been fueled by a number of factors, among them the advent and a wide adoption of the Internet and consequent rise of e-commerce, as well as the trend in manufacturing toward mass customization, all resulting with pleasing the customer and significantly reducing all elements of the lead time, but without serious sacrifices of the manufacturer. Further, while the commercial complex manufacturing industry may also suffer nowadays owing to the painful recession, it is quite the opposite case in the defense and other government-related industries, partly in light of possible confrontation with rogue countries abroad. Many enterprise applications vendors have spotted the opportunity and have lately been scrambling to address the exacting requirements of the project-based complex industries.
As already indicated, complex manufacturers, such as, e.g., aerospace & defense (A&D), high-tech or electronic manufacturers, must handle complex production processes and large, complex supplier networks. Sophisticated customer interactions (e.g., order/contract definition and management applications) are required, while customer service needs are also oriented toward hands-on contract management and cost reporting. Frequent changes force contract supplier engineers and OEM engineers to be in a constant collaborative communication throughout the design and production cycle of the unit. One of the most manual functions in a supplier organization have traditionally been the sell-side Request for Quote (RFQ) management, which usually revolves around a few key expert individuals that have direct knowledge of the product or who can manually pull together the diverse information sources into a unified document, as contract proposals include quotations, pricing, detailed product information, data sheets, and CAD drawings.
On the other hand, in almost all industrial manufacturing segments, the pressure to reduce lead times has become a constant and ever-expanding concern. Depending on product complexity, some parts/sub-assemblies might be quoted immediately, while others have to be highly specified. Developing a contract proposal requires many levels of checking and re-checking customer process requirements and facilities capabilities, as well as preliminary design work and sourcing of specific components or materials. The process typically goes through much iteration every time the customer uncovers a new requirement or constraint. The labor-intensive nature of this process has often resulted in lengthy estimating cycles, which have in turn often translated to lost business opportunities. By harnessing an enabling technology to make everybody work smarter rather than harder, complex manufacturers could e.g., reduce the time it takes to create contract estimates so that the same number of people could generate more proposals faster and thereby handle more sales opportunities without expanding staff. The combination of outsourced manufacturing with increasingly common configure-to-order (CTO) or build-to-order (BTO) production environments is further making unit-level data management an increasingly high priority for contract manufacturers and the companies that retain them.
Cincom seems to have responded to many nitty-gritty's of the above industries, since it has long developed sharp vertical engineer-to-order (ETO) complex manufacturing functionality, long before most of its peers had grasped the concept of vertical focus. By delivering cutting-edge functionality pertinent to complex discrete manufacturing and maintenance, repair & overhaul (MRO) enterprises, Cincom has made its name especially within the A&D segment. Additionally, with its iC Solutions (formerly called Acquire) product suite for sales force automation (SFA) and bid management functionality that is well-attuned to the CRM needs of complex manufacturers (and some non-manufacturing industries as well), Cincom struck a differentiating value proposition a long time ago.
Fundamentally, its current strategy seems to be sound in that it will continue to exploit complex discrete manufacturing functionality and service & support as its primary strengths and marketing means. While competitive costs (low and flexible software license pricing and implementation costs) and outstanding global service (proven fast implementations and customer loyalty) will remain important requirements for success, particularly in the lower end of the market, vertical focus will remain the key factor for survival. Winning enterprise applications will demonstrate deep industry functionality and tight integration with best-of-bread bolt-on' products in a particular vertical.
Software that combines industry-specific functionality with the flexibility to accommodate each company's unique processes goes a long way toward improving the functional fit and the speed of implementation, with accompanying quick ROI. This also means adding sector-specific, fine-grained front-office capabilities such as billing for utility companies or, as in Cincom's case, the provision of customer communication solutions and services, centered on the lifecycle of customer interaction, including pre-sales, ordering, fulfillment, servicing, and up-selling situations, outside of the conventional realm of an ERP system.
Responding to Market Pressure
With the newly released CRM offering, Cincom has been responding to the recent entry of former pure enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors to the CRM market space. While the pure CRM suite vendors have lately been re-architecting their offerings as to easily link to disparate back-office systems, several of the major ERP players have lately increased their CRM market presence mainly through the acquisition of former CRM application vendors, including Baan's acquisition of Aurum, PeopleSoft's acquisition of Vantive and J.D. Edwards' acquisition of YOUCentric (see PeopleSoft Buys CRM specialist Vantive for $433 Million and J.D. Edwards Fires Siebel, Hires YOU). In addition, Oracle, SAP and Intentia have painstakingly gradually introduced their own CRM application suites, which have been increasingly attaining the full-fledged CRM product statuses. The focus of these ERP vendors has, however, so far primarily been on providing contact and opportunity management and after-sale customer service/call center applications along with their traditional ERP offering.
Applications for customer interaction to satisfy to order' requirements have also been increasingly pursued lately, though, as very recently, mid-October, illustrated in J.D. Edwards' release of Advanced Order Configurator (AOC), the newest addition to the company's CRM product line, intended to accelerate the made-to-order (MTO) product purchase process. AOC reportedly offers automated catalog translation, compatibility with AutoCAD products, and a point-and-click Rules Manager, to provide sales representatives and customers the ability to visualize different variations of a product in real time. Additionally, AOC should enable users to review and verify product configurations from remote desktops and laptops, or via the Internet or direct enterprise network connections. The product will supposedly operate either as an independent application, or, more logically, integrated with its ERP siblings, J.D. Edwards ERP 8.0 or OneWorld Xe.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/cincom-asserts-expertise-in-crm-for-complex-manufacturers-16811/
Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions has spanned nearly four decades as a provider of solutions for manufacturers, and has always strived to provide its customers an evolutionary path through major technological changes, enabling them to keep pace without major disruption of their business. In recent years, Cincom has especially carved out expertise to satisfy the specific requirements of the complex manufacturing industry. Its knowledge of complex manufacturing has often ensured delivery of functional products bundled with rapid implementation resulting in one of the fastest Return-on-Investment (ROI) and one of the best customer service & support in the industry segment.
Complex manufacturers produce products that are of high variation, have complex features and options, and vary in end-user configuration. They consequently invest significant dollars in product design and have lengthy sales and manufacturing business processes, often requiring collaboration between the customer, sales representatives, and critical back-office experts. To that end, Cincom's CRM for Complex Manufacturers facilitates the real-time transfer of information and complex product knowledge for collaboration across the extended enterprise, and should especially be suited to organizations that seek to maintain complex selling relationships, such as businesses whose sales functions rely on channel partnerships or a distributed sales force. The solution is comprised of three components: Cincom's Knowledge Builder, Cincom's Sales Configurator, and Cincom's e-Channel. Purchased individually or as a total solution, the new Cincom CRM components were devised to provide the initial step for complex manufacturers who want to move their product life cycles closer to a mass customization model, in the quest for the ultimate combination of "custom made" and "mass production."
Cincom's Knowledge Builder was devised to simplify the most complex selling, while accelerating the sales cycle, broadening sales channels, and lowering the cost to sell. To that end, a manual process that took anywhere from a day to several days can now reportedly be accomplished in about one minute with the appropriate use of Knowledge Builder. Cincom's Knowledge Management (KM) technology provides the "intelligence" required to support the mass customization of products and services at the point of sale (POS). By providing intuitive rule creation and maintenance in an enterprise environment, companies should quickly and cost-effectively capture critical sales, engineering, and manufacturing knowledge for deployment across sales channels.
When products or services present customers with a complex set of choices, or where product components and pricing elements are subject to rapid change, requiring sales teams to have access to up-to-date configuration and pricing information, the Cincom CRM Solution for Complex Manufacturers comes into the picture to enable sales people and partners to establish smart sales processes worldwide. The e-Channel product enables companies with complex products and services to capture and distribute critical sale and product configuration knowledge across all sales channels. It supports direct and indirect sales channels, and it is a comprehensive interactive selling system for both networked and mobile users. The e-Channel Desktop module permits each sales agent to organize customer, product, pricing, and external information so that it is immediately accessible by anyone involved in the sales opportunity.
One of the most recent endorsements of the offering came in October, when TAFA, Inc., a Praxair Surface Technologies Company, announced it has completed the development phase of a new systems estimator based on Cincom Systems' Knowledge Builder application. The web-based program allows the user to create test configurations of automated thermal spray processing systems, and produce budgetary cost estimates to produce it, whereby the turnaround time to produce estimates has been slashed dramatically. Other notable recent customers of a similar profile have been Pellerin Milnor Corporation, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., American Power Conversion (APC), Greenheck Fan Corporation and Thyssen Aufzge Group.
This is Part One of a two-part analysis of recent Cincom news.
Part Two will detail the Challenges Cincom faces and make User Recommendations.
Market Impact
Despite current seemingly never-ending difficult economic times, the growth of complex contract-based manufacturing has still continued. This expansion has been fueled by a number of factors, among them the advent and a wide adoption of the Internet and consequent rise of e-commerce, as well as the trend in manufacturing toward mass customization, all resulting with pleasing the customer and significantly reducing all elements of the lead time, but without serious sacrifices of the manufacturer. Further, while the commercial complex manufacturing industry may also suffer nowadays owing to the painful recession, it is quite the opposite case in the defense and other government-related industries, partly in light of possible confrontation with rogue countries abroad. Many enterprise applications vendors have spotted the opportunity and have lately been scrambling to address the exacting requirements of the project-based complex industries.
As already indicated, complex manufacturers, such as, e.g., aerospace & defense (A&D), high-tech or electronic manufacturers, must handle complex production processes and large, complex supplier networks. Sophisticated customer interactions (e.g., order/contract definition and management applications) are required, while customer service needs are also oriented toward hands-on contract management and cost reporting. Frequent changes force contract supplier engineers and OEM engineers to be in a constant collaborative communication throughout the design and production cycle of the unit. One of the most manual functions in a supplier organization have traditionally been the sell-side Request for Quote (RFQ) management, which usually revolves around a few key expert individuals that have direct knowledge of the product or who can manually pull together the diverse information sources into a unified document, as contract proposals include quotations, pricing, detailed product information, data sheets, and CAD drawings.
On the other hand, in almost all industrial manufacturing segments, the pressure to reduce lead times has become a constant and ever-expanding concern. Depending on product complexity, some parts/sub-assemblies might be quoted immediately, while others have to be highly specified. Developing a contract proposal requires many levels of checking and re-checking customer process requirements and facilities capabilities, as well as preliminary design work and sourcing of specific components or materials. The process typically goes through much iteration every time the customer uncovers a new requirement or constraint. The labor-intensive nature of this process has often resulted in lengthy estimating cycles, which have in turn often translated to lost business opportunities. By harnessing an enabling technology to make everybody work smarter rather than harder, complex manufacturers could e.g., reduce the time it takes to create contract estimates so that the same number of people could generate more proposals faster and thereby handle more sales opportunities without expanding staff. The combination of outsourced manufacturing with increasingly common configure-to-order (CTO) or build-to-order (BTO) production environments is further making unit-level data management an increasingly high priority for contract manufacturers and the companies that retain them.
Cincom seems to have responded to many nitty-gritty's of the above industries, since it has long developed sharp vertical engineer-to-order (ETO) complex manufacturing functionality, long before most of its peers had grasped the concept of vertical focus. By delivering cutting-edge functionality pertinent to complex discrete manufacturing and maintenance, repair & overhaul (MRO) enterprises, Cincom has made its name especially within the A&D segment. Additionally, with its iC Solutions (formerly called Acquire) product suite for sales force automation (SFA) and bid management functionality that is well-attuned to the CRM needs of complex manufacturers (and some non-manufacturing industries as well), Cincom struck a differentiating value proposition a long time ago.
Fundamentally, its current strategy seems to be sound in that it will continue to exploit complex discrete manufacturing functionality and service & support as its primary strengths and marketing means. While competitive costs (low and flexible software license pricing and implementation costs) and outstanding global service (proven fast implementations and customer loyalty) will remain important requirements for success, particularly in the lower end of the market, vertical focus will remain the key factor for survival. Winning enterprise applications will demonstrate deep industry functionality and tight integration with best-of-bread bolt-on' products in a particular vertical.
Software that combines industry-specific functionality with the flexibility to accommodate each company's unique processes goes a long way toward improving the functional fit and the speed of implementation, with accompanying quick ROI. This also means adding sector-specific, fine-grained front-office capabilities such as billing for utility companies or, as in Cincom's case, the provision of customer communication solutions and services, centered on the lifecycle of customer interaction, including pre-sales, ordering, fulfillment, servicing, and up-selling situations, outside of the conventional realm of an ERP system.
Responding to Market Pressure
With the newly released CRM offering, Cincom has been responding to the recent entry of former pure enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors to the CRM market space. While the pure CRM suite vendors have lately been re-architecting their offerings as to easily link to disparate back-office systems, several of the major ERP players have lately increased their CRM market presence mainly through the acquisition of former CRM application vendors, including Baan's acquisition of Aurum, PeopleSoft's acquisition of Vantive and J.D. Edwards' acquisition of YOUCentric (see PeopleSoft Buys CRM specialist Vantive for $433 Million and J.D. Edwards Fires Siebel, Hires YOU). In addition, Oracle, SAP and Intentia have painstakingly gradually introduced their own CRM application suites, which have been increasingly attaining the full-fledged CRM product statuses. The focus of these ERP vendors has, however, so far primarily been on providing contact and opportunity management and after-sale customer service/call center applications along with their traditional ERP offering.
Applications for customer interaction to satisfy to order' requirements have also been increasingly pursued lately, though, as very recently, mid-October, illustrated in J.D. Edwards' release of Advanced Order Configurator (AOC), the newest addition to the company's CRM product line, intended to accelerate the made-to-order (MTO) product purchase process. AOC reportedly offers automated catalog translation, compatibility with AutoCAD products, and a point-and-click Rules Manager, to provide sales representatives and customers the ability to visualize different variations of a product in real time. Additionally, AOC should enable users to review and verify product configurations from remote desktops and laptops, or via the Internet or direct enterprise network connections. The product will supposedly operate either as an independent application, or, more logically, integrated with its ERP siblings, J.D. Edwards ERP 8.0 or OneWorld Xe.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/cincom-asserts-expertise-in-crm-for-complex-manufacturers-16811/
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