Simplify Your Sales Processes With Genius ERP’s Product Configurator

Your products aren’t one-size-fits-all. As a custom manufacturer, everything you build is tailored to meet your customers’ exacting needs. But this poses a problem: How can your sales team easily create accurate quotes that ensure a profit without needing input from your engineering department? Plus, as your range of product options expands, the complexity of managing these options also increases. 

Genius ERP’s product configurator is the answer. 

Our product configurator lets your sales team quickly and intuitively configure customized products based on customer specifications. With its user-friendly interface, even sales reps who lack technical expertise can effortlessly generate accurate quotes, eliminating the need for constant back-and-forth with the engineering department. 

Genius ERP’s product configurator also streamlines the management of an expanding range of product options, simplifying the complexity of customization and ensuring efficient operations throughout your manufacturing process.

What is a Product Configurator?

A product configurator is specialized software that allows you to create customized products according to your customer’s preferences and needs, right down to the smallest details. Users can select from various options, such as colors, sizes, features, and accessories, to create a product that meets their specific needs and preferences. 

The configurator generates a visual representation of the customized product in real time, allowing you to see exactly how the specific choices will affect the final product. Genius ERP’s product configurator also automatically creates a customized quote—and bill of manufacturing (BOM)—from the selections, speeding up sales and production processes. A product configurator automates the process of creating tailored products, ensuring accuracy and consistency while minimizing the need for constant back-and-forth with other departments in your shop. Also, by integrating seamlessly with other systems in your shop, like inventory management and production planning, it enhances operational efficiency and enables you to meet diverse customer requirements.

Why Do You Need a Product Configurator?

1. Streamline Sales Processes

Your current sales approach might heavily involve engineering—leading to inefficiencies. 

If your sales team is unsure about available options for a product, it can lead to a lot of back-and-forth between various departments and customers, consuming valuable time. A product configurator minimizes such complexities, enabling quicker and smoother quoting processes.

2. Ensure Correct Configurations

Without a product configurator, your sales team could offer options that don’t fit together. 

Ensuring products are correctly configured often demands significant experience—experience that your sales team may lack. This lack of experience can result in constant consultations with engineering and/or production teams to address configuration issues. With a product configurator, you can swiftly determine the feasibility of various options, minimizing unnecessary interactions with engineering.

3. Maintain Pricing Consistency

In the absence of a product configurator, the price provided to a customer can change based on who does the estimate—which spells trouble for your shop.

Consistency is key: You don’t want different prices given out for the same product and options. A product configurator mitigates such errors, ensuring consistency in pricing regardless of who creates the estimate.

4. Enhance Customer Experience

Presenting your options to customers should be straightforward, but without a centralized system for managing product configurations, explaining your options to customers can become convoluted and prone to errors.

A product configurator consolidates all information into one user-friendly platform, facilitating clearer communication between your reps and customers. With a product configurator, no matter the choices, you can show visuals of the finished product, reducing the risk of unsatisfied customers due to unclear information.

Genius ERP’s Product Configurator

Genius ERP’s robust and user-friendly product configurator is designed specifically for custom manufacturers. Integrated seamlessly into our software, our tool simplifies the process of configuring custom builds from start to finish by allowing you to easily select and combine pre-existing elements.

The product configurator is a powerful solution that significantly reduces the time and expertise required to generate accurate quotes and sales orders. With our tool, your sales team gains access to a comprehensive list of configurable products, options, and visuals, quickly facilitating the creation of accurate quotes—while ensuring profitability through accurate pricing. 

Our tool is also easy to manage and add new options to, making it a great choice for your complex manufacturing operations.

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In cases where a product is fully configurable, Genius ERP automates the entire process, eliminating the need for additional engineering and even automatically generates a detailed Bill of Manufacturing (BOM). If engineering is needed, our tool easily facilitates communication between sales, engineering and production.

Without the product configurator, custom manufacturers would rely on cumbersome spreadsheets to piece together products and approximate BOMs. With Genius ERP, this process is automated, streamlining the entire workflow for you.

Why Choose Genius ERP’s Product Configurator?

Genius ERP’s product configurator gives you all the advantages of a regular product configurator, but it also has additional built-in features that make it the right choice for custom manufacturers.

1. Easy Adjustments

Unlike cumbersome configurators that require specialized computer programming expertise when any modifications or additions are needed, Genius ERP’s solution is user-friendly. You have complete control, and making additions and adjustments to available options is effortless and can be easily done without specialized skills.

2. Seamless Integration

Even if the customer picks configurable options, with some product configurators, your engineering department still has to be involved in designing and preparing detailed drawings to identify what has to be purchased. This will never happen with Genius ERP: Our configurator seamlessly translates customer preferences into detailed bills of manufacturing (BOMs), eliminating the need for any intervention from engineering.

3. Expedited Processes

From quoting to fabrication to delivery, Genius ERP accelerates every stage of the production cycle. By minimizing manual processes and streamlining workflows, you gain a competitive edge, achieving faster turnaround times and bolstering market presence.

Benefits for Your Sales Team:

1. Consistency in Pricing

Genius ERP’s product configurator ensures uniformity in sales price calculation by using selections and price lists stored within the system. 

This consistency empowers you to provide accurate and standardized quotes to customers, regardless of the sales representative handling the transaction. With predefined pricing parameters, every quote reflects the same standard, enhancing professionalism and trust.

2. Empowered Sales Representatives

Our product configurator allows sales reps to operate within predefined boundaries, enabling them to offer tailored options and prices without constant reliance on engineering or other departments. 

This autonomy not only expedites the quoting process but also fosters a sense of ownership and empowerment among sales teams.

3. Enhanced Efficiency

By streamlining the quoting process, Genius ERP’s product configurator significantly increases efficiency. Sales teams can swiftly navigate through configurable products, options, and visuals to generate comprehensive and accurate quotes for clients. 

This efficiency not only saves time but also ensures that the prices provided guarantee the desired profit margins, optimizing sales operations.

4. Improved Communication

With the product configurator serving as a centralized platform, you can ensure seamless communication between customer requirements and engineering specifications. 

By consolidating all relevant information in one place, miscommunication and misunderstandings are minimized, facilitating smoother interactions between sales, engineering, and customers.

5. Facilitating Onboarding of New Sales Representatives

The intuitive nature of Genius ERP’s product configurator simplifies the onboarding process for new sales representatives. 

With user-friendly tools and predefined parameters, new hires can quickly adapt to quoting processes and effectively serve customers, reducing ramp-up time and increasing productivity.

Benefits for Your Production Team:

1. Streamlined BOMs

In addition to the advantages for your sales team, Genius ERP’s product configurator seamlessly generates detailed bills of manufacturing (BOMs) in the background. By automating this process based on customer selections, businesses can ensure accurate material and item requirements for production, eliminating manual data entry and minimizing errors.

2. Optimized Routing and Work Instructions

Our product configurator not only sets the optimal routing steps for production but also provides detailed work instructions to shop employees. This ensures that production processes are executed efficiently and accurately, leading to faster fabrication and delivery times.

3. Reduction in Process Time

With Genius ERP’s product configurator, businesses can drastically reduce process times across the board. From quoting to fabrication to delivery, the streamlined workflows enable faster turnaround times, allowing companies to meet customer demands more effectively and gain a competitive edge in the market.

4. User-Friendly and Easy to Maintain

Last but not least, our product configurator is designed to be user-friendly and easy to maintain. 

With intuitive interfaces and straightforward tools, businesses can leverage the full potential of the configurator without extensive training or technical expertise. Plus, ongoing maintenance is simplified, ensuring continued efficiency and reliability.

Learn More About Genius ERP’s Product Configurator

Genius ERP’s product configurator lets you create personalized solutions for your customers while streamlining your sales processes. With a few clicks, you can easily configure a new product while generating visuals and pricing that you can share with your customers. 

Our system makes it easy to modify and add new features—and even communicate with your engineering department, if necessary. Plus, when you click save, you not only generate a price list and customized quote, but Genius ERP automatically creates an itemized BOM ready for procurement and production. 

To learn more about our product configurator, and see it in action, please watch our Product Configurator webinar, available on-demand.