Scaling your Custom-made Manufacturing
Design Software is the Key to Leverage Skilled Labor, Scale your Business, and Customer-happiness
- Custom-made + Scaling
Isn’t something that is supposed to be custom-made inherently excluded from scaling? Not, if you optimize for your customer process with software and leverage your skilled personnel. - Scaling + Growth
To grow you had to sell more. You’d have to add more salespeople, more engineers, more tradespeople… accordingly.
Software for skilled labor allows you to leave the linear growth path behind and scale by leveraging existing labor (“improving efficiency and cost savings”) and empower new segments (“making the pie bigger”) - Manufacturing + Skilled Labor
Manufacturing is industrialization and industrialization is scaling. Machines and automation have been the greatest leverage in the industrialization. Software is the key to leverage skilled labor.
How to Scale your Business and Customer-happiness while Becoming more Efficient and Customer-inclusive
Every manufacturing process for any custom-made product starts with a customer specifying the kind of product they need and some sort of salesperson taking notes and making recommendations. Then passed on to an engineer this rough input serves as foundation for a proposed solution. Designing a solution needs its time and further inquiry are business as usual. Then the job can then be priced accordingly and the potential customer gets served a quote. It is not unusual that a customer makes modification requests, which forces the process to restart from the beginning every time. All in all it takes some serious time to even start with the manufacturing itself.
This by itself is reason enough to heavily invest in optimizing this entire exploring your customers needs, configuring the product, pricing, and quoting processes. But what if you want to go further than that and grow your business?
Growing your Business: Increase Effectiveness and Efficiency
Growing your business means that you have to add engineers and salespeople and tradespeople accordingly. Finding skilled employees has become very difficult and you will have to train them before they are fully effective on their job. Using technology to automate helps you to increase effectiveness and efficiency and leverage the work of your existing workforce.
Automate Manufacturing
First, you can automate manufacturing. Automation of manufacturing or the automation of tradespeople often takes the form of robots, making work safer, performing the tedious and dangerous tasks, or supersede skilled tradespeople shortage. With the rise of digital fabrication technologies automation reaches even higher dimensions.
Automate Sales and Engineering
With the new manufacturing capacities you’ll soon have the same problem along all your adjacent production processes: You need to add people, salespeople and engineers, linearly in order to grow the business. Or, you get creative and leverage the productivity of the existing ones.
As with manufacturing leverage is done best by utilizing technology, which in this case isn’t robots but software. Specifically, software that assists your sales and engineering and for that matter all your skilled employees. You want to start with the messiest and most
With custom-made the most difficult and time consuming process is when communicating with your prospective customers and for that matter every time you need to find out what they really want, the specifications, the price price… The “Call Sales” and “Get a Quote” and What-not’s are in the first line of needing an overhaul in how you interact with your potential customers more effectively and efficiently.
How to do that with custom-made and engineer-to order products? You could do that by “outsourcing” some of your work to the customer.
“Outsource” to your customer
Who knows best what they want? Your customer.
Do they know what it is exactly they want? Not necessarily, but they have an idea and then they have you and your expertise.
While everything else here is more about increasing efficiency by leveraging technology the following is more about effectiveness. While efficiency is all about “doing the work right and better” effectiveness is all about “doing the right work in the first place” So additionally to making it more efficient for salespeople and engineers to deliver on requests for quotations, we should ask on how to include our customer in an optimal way in the value creation process. We “outsource” parts of the work to our customer.
Since our customer has to do certain work and provide us with certain details anyways it is paradigm to use tools and provide our customers with solutions that make it as efficient for both of us and as enjoyable as possible for them. A “Get a Quote”, “Request for Quotation”, “Call Sales”, or any variation of that call-to-action is not enjoyable at all. More and more customers need and want help which e.g. has increased costs spent on call-centers dramatically. Some study, of which I’m unable to find the citation right now, stated that customer interactions are becoming more complex and phone calls have gotten 40% longer already in recent years. How do you fill your sales funnel, drive customer-satisfaction, and make customer-success happen at the same time?
As your business grows you can add engineers and salespeople accordingly, or you empower your customers and increase effectiveness by providing them with tools that enable them to better tell you what they really want.
70% of buying decisions are based on how well the customers feel they are understood
— McKinsey
Include your customer
Once you’ve determined what’s the the right work to do (effectiveness) it’s time to turn to how to do that work efficient.
It is software that virtually brings the customer, the salesperson and the engineer together. It’s thanks to modern communication technology. When talking about modern communication technology people often think of video-conferencing. What many have not overcome is that video-conferencing is not the poor’s manager flight, but it is the smart’s manager’s tool to leverage themselves. Once you understand that, you won’t hesitate to leverage your expertise and your companies’ ability to become the leader of your niche, of your industry. Maybe it helps thinking of it this way: At your next big company event would you rather have the President of the United States have a conference call with you or a somebody who could make their schedule work around yours?
Same with talking to your customer: you want to find the right medium and the right place to communicate with your customers preferably right where they are. Today they are on the Internet. They research before purchasing, because they don’t know the perfect solution might be just yet and to compare different approaches and solutions. There’s done more research and comparison pre-purchase than ever, and it’s conducted preferably online instead of calling company after company.
56% of consumers are much more likely to buy from companies who allow them to shape their products or services.
— Microsoft
And the secret is that strengstens the relationship with your customers. It takes your relationship with them to new heights as your customers will feel empowered when you include them in the production process. McKinsey finds that 70% of buying decisions are based on how well the customers feel they are understood. What does that more than the possibility to actually let your customers tell you what they want and how they want it? Research conducted by the Digital Agency Wunderman finds that 79% of B2B buyers will only consider doing business with brands that understand and care about each customer’s needs. But it’s not just B2B that cares. A recent Microsoft study finds that 56% of consumers are much more likely to buy from companies who allow them to shape their products or services.
So, the direction is pretty clear: You have to have to interact with your customers one way or the other anyways. Webforms, telephone and adding more people to sales and engineering will not cut it. Leveraging technology in a smart way will put you ahead of your competition. The good news is that your customers don’t just have higher expectations but they are also willing to pay: According to Forrester 64% of B2B customers say the buying experience is a more important decision factor than price. That is excellent news!
64% of B2B customers say the buying experience is a more important decision factor than price.
— Forrester
Visual Communication and Design
Imagine the perfect communication tool. It would be a design tool that everybody can interact with. Humans are visual animals. We sketch out to illustrate, we make gestures to make a point, we use visual cues to emphasize… scribbles, sketches, doodles… We see the world through our eyes and make use of visuals to communicate. But design tools are rather poor and difficult and most of our abilities to design are more or less insufficient and little developed.
And people don’t want to start from a blank slate. Remember, they already have a problem and they are looking for a solution that fits. This is where visual product configuration comes in.
Visual Product Configuration
Product configurators are built to cover most of the use-cases of what your customers are looking for. They give you already a pretty good idea of the product and leave you with just the right degree of freedom to specify what is important for a custom-made product. Configurators only allow the user to build sound and manufacturable structures. For edge cases and for requirements that are not represented by the configurator your customer would still have to call an sales-engineer. But even then the visual representation and the interactivity of the product will provide you with a perfect conversation starter to determine what your customer is actually looking for. With product configurators your customer has all the information they need available, right in front of them. And they get an individual quote instantly. Product configurators are the perfect visual communication tool for external as well as internal customers.
To realize product configurators you have to define the parts used in your products. A nice side-effect is that this usually decreases the number of parts when your engineering team has to get creative and increases the number of standard parts that can be used across different of your products. The implementation requires some coordination between the engineers and fabricators. But the result is that you turn your customers into engineers. without them having to know anything about engineering.
Smart algorithms and a Manufacturing Data Platform on the backend ensure that the software only creates solutions that are structurally sound, legal and safe. Product Configurators running on a Manufacturing Data Platform are the perfect means to cover most of your request for quotations instantly and get all the data in the right format at the right time to the right people and machines. Visual design software leverages your skilled personnel. for internal customers as well as external customers. Check out Coshape customizer with configure-price-quoting capabilities to understand how to have complex communication with your customers online.
79% of B2B buyers will only consider doing business with brands that understand and care about each customer’s needs.
— Digital Agency Wunderman
Success
Setting up your business for long-term success, customer satisfaction, and growth goes beyond automating your production processes. Soon you’ll find out that you have the same problems you had in manufacturing down the line as well. You need to add people everywhere to grow your business. It’s all about the customer funnel. On the front end of your operation, the selling side, you need to optimize with CRM or Manufacturing Planning Software to help you produce quotes or push forward the production process.
Elimination of time lags, paperwork and the hassle that your customer, your salespeople and your engineers have to endure when executing a successful sale from beginning to end is the priority of every successful company. Your ultimate goal stemming from a more effective and efficient communication should be:
- Instant pricing and quotation — no potential customer wants to wait when it comes to finding out about what your product will eventually cost and if you’re able to produce it.
- Direct customer to manufacturing input — take the input that your customers already have you provided you with and use it for all the other processes all the way to fulfillment.
Visual Product Configurators built on a capable Manufacturing Data Platform provides you with the resources to scale your skilled labor force.
