What has a shortage of engineers got to do with product configuration?
28 June 2011
In the past few months, there have been reports about a significant shortage of engineers in a number of countries. The Association of German Engineers (VDI) recently reported that the shortage of engineers has increased by 19% to 58,400 vacancies. Germany is especially struggling with a shortage of engineers in machine and vehicle construction, and electronics. We also see this phenomenon in other western economies.
Crucial knowledge disappearing
We’re also hearing this from our customers. We regularly find that crucial knowledge is threatening to disappear from a company because experienced engineers retire. When these positions cannot be filled, there can be far-reaching consequences for the company involved.
Better use of scarce capacity
A way to deal with the shortage of engineers is to make sure that they are deployed mainly for innovative tasks and the development of new products. We often find that scarce engineers are used to produce and assess quotations. Using Guided Selling correctly, an engineer’s knowledge can be utilized far more effectively. By incorporating the rules dealing with technical knowledge for configurable products in the lines of a model that can be used by sales, you make sure that sales doesn’t need to continually rely on engineering. The Guided Selling system ensures that sales can produce calculations, configurations and quotations that they can guarantee are accurate. The engineers are called upon less often to take care of recurring jobs, making possible better use of their scarce capacities.
Meeting current demand
In this way, a threatening shortage of engineers becomes an opportunity for your company: by introducing a Guided Selling system, sales people can produce quotations more quickly and be sure that the product configurations satisfy the technical rules put in place by the engineers. And the scarce engineers can put more time into developing new solutions that meet current demand.
Otto van der Tang is Managing Director at Sofon - supplier of sales support software. As Otto has a lot of contact with clients, he has a clear insight into how companies that deliver customer-specific products and services can realize improvements within their sales and quotation process.
Comments
No entries
