Framing the Future: How FHC Revolutionized Custom Quoting with Epicor CPQ
Frameless Hardware Company (FHC) is a leading manufacturer and supplier of custom glass and glazing products, serving the architectural glass, glazing, and fenestration industries. Their product lineup includes hinges, pulls, clamps, sealants, and components for frameless shower doors, commercial storefronts, architectural railings, and transaction windows.
At the heart of FHC’s operations are highly customizable products tailored to unique project specifications and customer requirements. Their doors, railings, and other glazing systems involve countless potential combinations of dimensions, glass types, finishes, hardware options, and more.
Accurately quoting and designing these intricate custom configurations was an immense challenge for FHC. Their manual, spreadsheet-driven process couldn't adequately handle the inherent product and pricing complexity, leading to potential errors and inefficiencies.
FHC departments, including sales, engineering, and manufacturing, worked within siloed systems. Manually translating and transferring data between disconnected applications was time-consuming and error-prone without a unified platform. Essential details could easily be lost, miscommunicated, or miskeyed when requirements captured by sales were passed through engineering's product modeling.
FHC could not show customers lifelike visualizations of custom products, which created doubts. Customers needed a compelling and interactive means to explore and engage with products before purchasing, leading to lower customer confidence and potentially lost sales opportunities.
FHC implemented Epicor CPQ across sales, engineering, and manufacturing to overhaul its process inefficiencies. Specifically, Epicor CPQ provided a centralized platform for automating the entire quote-to-order process, from product configuration and real-time visualization to accurate cost modeling and document generation.
The compelling value proposition of Epicor CPQ for FHC was its ability to unify previously siloed processes for configuration, pricing, visualization, and more into a single seamless workflow. Product requirements no longer needed to be manually re-keyed and re-interpreted in each system from sales to the shop floor––everything was automated from end to end.
The intuitive 3D configurators within Epicor CPQ make it easy to capture detailed and accurate client requirements at the earliest stages of the sales cycle. As modifications are made, customers and the FHC sales team receive live, lifelike visualizations with dynamic pricing reflecting pre-defined rules and fluctuating costs.
(With Epicor CPQ), a customer can design their product, pick the color, size, bells, and whistles, and receive a quote. In the end, a nice drawing shows all the parts and custom features.
Once the customer is satisfied with their configuration, the verified and error-proof design can be automatically pushed downstream to fulfillment. This seamless workflow eliminates the need for manual data entry and reduces the risk of errors. Epicor CPQ ensures that product specifications are accurately communicated to the production team without any back-and-forth.
Beyond visualization and pricing, a core strength of Epicor CPQ for FHC was its pre-built connectors and API integration capabilities. These allow FHC to consolidate a formerly fragmented system into a single source of truth.
Rather than treating the configurator as a self-contained system that would introduce another discontinuity into their workflow, Epicor CPQ acts as a centralized integration hub, bringing unification to the FHC operational and IT infrastructure.
By empowering customers and sales teams to configure even the most complex product definitions visually within the Epicor CPQ intuitive interface, FHC has completely re-imagined what is possible regarding time-to-quote and time-to-production.
Processing large quotes and entering them into the system used to take 1-2 hours. Using Epicor CPQ, we can now complete the same task in just 10-15 minutes at most…it automatically connects to our systems—no manual input.
Elaborate configurations that previously demanded hours of manual back-and-forth between stakeholders can now be spun up in seconds. Large quotes that used to take as long as two hours to enter the system now take as little as ten minutes.
One of the biggest impacts is we're giving the customer a tool to gain custom pricing from our products instantly, without needing an expert's help or waiting 48 hours for a quote.
On the engineering side, the time savings prove even more dramatic. 90% of orders no longer require manual engineering work. Engineering tasks that took hours now take minutes, which means customers get their orders faster. With the FHC engineering staff relieved of the bulk of tedious transactional work, they can focus on the most complex custom orders and higher-value tasks instead.
Historically, complex product configurations at FHC required extensive specialized expertise held by a limited number of application engineers and sales personnel. Now, team members can use Epicor CPQ to configure products without specialist knowledge, making the FHC sales team effortlessly scalable.
By automating the configuration/quoting process, Epicor CPQ has allowed the sales team to focus on revenue-generating activities like pursuing new business and strengthening customer relationships. Simultaneously, the engineering team can devote more resources to the most complex, high-value projects. Together, these changes effectively increase FHC's sales capacity and revenue potential without expanding its headcount.