News

Success: Use SAP-VC offline to quote customers with Swiss precision [2008-06-03]

Netstal, the Swiss manufacturer of advanced high quality injection molding machines, achieves great user acceptance of "Configit Quote for SAP" – an offline quotation tool for the sales force.

Netstal's business challenge

"Netstal's introduction of new complex products with a large number of variants made it impossible to create and maintain paper catalogs. We needed a strong mobile sales configurator that was easy to use for the sales force while keeping our existing SAP application flow intact", explains Robert Isler, CIO, Netstal.

The obvious choice for the bottom line

"Configit Quote turned out to be the obvious choice. It is very user-friendly with modern look and feel. Configit Quote has given us much shorter sales cycles and a considerable drop in flawed machine specifications."

Most impressive

Robert Isler continues to conclude that: "Most impressive however, is Configit Quote's ability to capture and use the SAP variant configurator outside the system and to feed quotes back into SAP. The tool ensures consistency and leaves our business processes unbroken"

From concept to global roll-out in 9 months

The concept of using Configit's VT-technology to distill and publish product rules, options and calculation from SAP to user-friendly Office-like applications that allow the sales force to quote with confidence was introduced at the SAP Configuration Workgroup [CWG] Conference in Salzburg, May 2007.

Configit Software and their US partner eSpline launched "SilverMine" as an open invitation for SAP customers to experiment with this new technology and Netstal quickly decided to pursue this new opportunity for the SAP platform, based on the distilled configurators in the SilverMine initiative. The concept for extending the SAP footprint to offline sales support was established in June 2007 and Netstal successfully achieved global roll out already in February 2008.

Silver into Gold

Lars Hoegsted, VP Sales, Configit, explains: "SilverMine is an early adopter initiative founded to explore the enormous potential that you can release by extending the footprint of your SAP product models to support new types of users and business scenarios. Netstal's success documents the opportunity for companies that invest time and expertise in modeling their configurable products and offerings in their SAP system. By extending the footprint of this product knowledge to be available offline, they can convert their existing silvermine of product data into a real goldmine."

About eSpline LLC

eSpline, LLC is a Columbus, OH based software development and consulting company specializing in improving and optimizing a complex products and services oriented customer’s business processes using SAP as its core business application. Customer’s benefit through application of eSpline's extensive and in-depth knowledge of SAP configuration applications and eSpline's focused approach to solving configuration oriented application problems using sound, tested processes and building software tools.

Specializing in SAP-VC, IPC and IPC Advanced Mode configuration applications, eSpline offers SAP configurator project assistance with Blueprinting, Design, Project Planning, Product Modeling, Project Management, Product Model Outsourcing, Resource Planning, and Integration and Implementation Services. Customized training for SAP VC, IPC and Advanced Mode configuration is also provided for individual customer projects or sessions for multiple customers. Our consultants have assisted large and mid-sized companies realize the benefits of process integration, resource planning, e-commerce and best practices modeling. More information on eSpline can be found at: www.espline.com.

About Configit A/S

Configit is a Copenhagen-based independent software vendor that offers third generation configuration solutions to companies with product configuration needs. The configurators are used for exploring the variance in product development, for sales configurations, and for maintenance, service and overhaul of complex products. A standalone version of the software tool can be freely downloaded in a trial version from the company More information on Configit can be found on the web at: www.co

For further information please contact:

eSpline LLC
Phone: +1 (614) 442-3977
eMail: info@eSpline.com