Design collaboration tool shortens sales cycles; raises revenue for Fresno Valves
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/1/2006 12:00:00 AM MST
Fresno Valves & Castings, Selma, Calif., significantly boosted its revenue stream after it began using a design collaboration solution to support the sale of its custom irrigation gates.
"There was a bottleneck in engineering," says Jim Brown, an independent consultant who works with Fresno Valves on business process management and IT issues. "Salespeople were getting a lot of orders for the gates, and the manufacturing side had the resources to build them, but we couldn't get the orders through engineering."
None of the orders could bypass engineering because each gate requires some amount of customization. That meant a salesperson had to communicate the unique customer requirements to an engineer, who generated an initial design that would be passed on to the customer for review.
With the salespeople submitting all of this information to engineering manually—literally on paper—and customers routinely requiring additional changes after reviewing the initial design, it typically took several weeks for an order to reach manufacturing.
At one point, Brown says, engineering was so backlogged that the company stopped taking new orders for the gates. Then it learned about a collaboration solution from a vendor called RuleStream.
The RuleStream package allowed Fresno Valves to automate its entire sales-order process. Now salespeople use a PC-based application that presents them with a series of questions to ask customers when taking orders for irrigation gates. This interface is linked to a rules engine that generates specifications for a new gate almost instantly, using the information the salesperson enters.
Before it was deployed, the rules engine was programmed to mimic the thinking of a Fresno Valves engineer in responding to customer requirements. Sukhbir Singh, Fresno Valve's engineering manager, says embedding that engineering knowledge in the system was the most difficult part of the implementation because it required getting the entire engineering staff to agree on standard methods of designing gates to fulfill various customer requirements.
"It made us think about the way we did business," says Singh. "Now we follow a standard process for filling every order. We are even using standard materials. The program always gives us the best, most cost-effective option for building a gate."
More important, sales orders for the gates only need to go through engineering if the customer requests an option that has not yet been loaded into the rules engine's knowledge base. "Most orders can go from sales to manufacturing in less than 30 minutes," Singh says.
In addition to clearing up the bottleneck for irrigation gates, Singh says, having the RuleStream application in place has freed Fresno Valves engineers to start creating new products. The result, he says, has been an overall fivefold increase in sales since the RuleStream application was installed.
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