System discontinuities and manual work are over: Today, sales staff at Pumpenfabrik Wangen capture all customer requirements via configurations-based “Guided selling”. With the solutions from Tacton Systems and Lino, the finished offer, including drawings, price and delivery time, is ready within a few hours.
Pumpenfabrik Wangen GmbH specializes in highly developed pumps for the food, chemical, agricultural, sewage and environmental technology sectors. Especially when it comes to the use of viscous or chemically aggressive media, the Allgäu-based company is the undisputed market leader with its cavity and screw pumps. Innovative spirit and customer orientation determine success, which is why the Pumpenfabrik Wangen manufactures both special designs and modular standard pumps with a wide range of variants – depending on the place of use, the medium to be pumped and the pumping task.
In order to select and configure the most suitable pump model in each case, further data from a wide variety of sources must be brought together in addition to customer requirements. Up to now, the Microsoft ERP as well as product catalogs and Excel lists were the main sources of information and technical support available to the sales staff. Despite frequently long processing times, this sometimes resulted in contradictory, unclear configurations. Pumpenfabrik Wangen decided to improve the overall process quality. The actual customer requirements were to be recorded more precisely and linked with the product and experience knowledge of the employees. The company was looking for an automated, synchronous configuration solution that would accelerate all steps: product selection, pricing, creation of dimension sheets, parts lists and, of course, accurate quotations.
Of the providers considered, the overall package from Lino GmbH was particularly convincing with its intuitive and seamless configuration via Tacton add-ons for Solidworks. In the background, special Lino extensions for integration and automation ensure a connection to the ERP system. This creates a process-spanning “single point of truth” with a central configuration model as the data source – and with unprecedented consistency.
In the sales and quotation process, the Pumpenfabrik Wangen benefits because rule-based product configuration, including pricing, is now possible via Tacton’s online CPQ system. And thanks to Lino 3D web, the configured products can be visualized in real time. In the design process, Tacton Design Automation ensures automated and rule-based design processes and Lino 2D fix reliably handles the correct creation of drawing documents. With the ERP integration created by Lino, all technical pump specifications are transferred directly to the PDM system.
What once seemed unthinkable has become routine: The pump specialist now creates around twelve pump quotations a day, including dimension sheets, parts lists and prices. This is because the automation solution eliminates the need for repeated and error-prone coordination with customers. And because the valuable relationship knowledge of the employees is available in the rules, only 50 percent of the time elapses between the initial inquiry and the technically mature quotation. This also pleases demanding customers.
Learn more about the Wangen project in the detailed case study.