- Question: Summarize this case:

Fujitsu Selects a SaaS Solution to Simplify the Sales Process:

If you surf the web, stream video on your phone, or watch cable TV in North America, equipment from Fujitsu Network Communications most likely keeps you connected. Fujitsu Network Communications Inc., based in Richardson, Texas, provides optical and wireless networking equipment, including servers, storage products, client computing devices, scanners, printers, and displays. It is a leading patent-holder in optical networking. Fujitsu network equipment provides optical transport solutions to major telecommunications carriers across North America.

There are more than 450,000 Fujitsu network elements, including shelves and cards that house connectivity hardware, signaling and routing setup, and management provisioning. The companys numerous products contain thousands of parts and innumerable configuration scenarios. A single product, for example, might be priced differently for 600 separate customers be-cause pricing is determined by a customers unique configurations concerning network sites, geographic locations, and distances between sites. Additionally, each of the various sites in a network involves a multitude of setup configurations concerning power supply, labeling, and rules for communication. Just think how difficult the process of configuring, pricing, and quoting orders for products and services might be for a 40-site network, which is not uncommon. For many years, Fujitsu sales teams had trouble handling all this complexity in the sales and ordering processes. They had to use individual spread-sheets to configure, price, and quote (CPQ) solutions for their customers. The company had no centralized repository for price quotes, records of offerings, or capability for integrating quotes with the ordering process. Even though Fujitsu had an ERP system to maintain its enterprise-wide master pricing and materials master data, the CPQ process still took days and resulted in quoting errors and countless hours of corrections and rework. A system solution was in order. Dave Hawkins,

Fujitsus Vice President of Sales Engineering, Sales Operations, and Commercial Management, and his team issued a request for proposal (RFP) for a solution that would produce quotes quickly and reduce quoting errors and rework. The most critical requirements were the ability to centralize and control all of the quoting that was going on, ensure accurate pricing, and ensure that the parts being configured were all available. A rigorous selection process identified FPXs soft-ware as a service (SaaS) CPQ quote solution as the best choice.

FPX is a leading vendor of cloud-based configure-price-quote (CPQ) software and a certified SAP Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner. Only the FPX solution had the ability to integrate with Fujitsus front-end Salesforce lead management and forecasting software and also with data from the companys back-end ERP systemand it ran on a cloud computing platform. FPX CPQ automatically configures all sales orders, even when they are based on extremely complex business rules. The software validates all selections of products and services to eliminate costly rework and helps preserve profit margins by requiring approval for discounts that exceed preapproved levels.

For Fujitsu, FPX CPQ automates all of the companys complex pricing rules and requirements and integrates them almost in real time with the quoting system so that quotes and orders are able to immediately capture any change to product and materials master data. Pricing that used to take Fujitsus sales teams days to calculate now just takes seconds. And by centralizing this information, one does not have to pore through individual spreadsheets to see how pricing is being done. When a change is made, it no longer is buried in one or a handful of spreadsheets maintained by individual sales staff. FPX CPQ can also automatically recognize additional opportunities based on changing the placement of a product in a specific location. This feature eliminates the cumbersome manual process of crosschecking a configuration against a promotion list and eliminates the need to make post-sale con-cessions to customers who did not initially receive the lowest-cost option. Within six months of implementing FPX CPQ, Fujitsu was already achieving business benefits. A single cloud-based platform for CPQ replaced multiple quoting systems for con-figuring multishelf and multislot networking plat-forms. Pricing errors were reduced by 80 percent which in turn significantly reduced rework and write-downs (reductions in the value of an asset). The overall cycle time (total time from beginning to end of a process) decreased as well. Moreover, automating the CPQ enterprise-wide made it possible to see more important information about sales, services, and what customers were requesting. Every time a change is made, such as a new price, new product availability, or a change in a product description, all users can see that change as soon as they access the system and look at their quotes. If a quote is in the process of being generated, Fujitsu can also update that quote with such changes. End users can be out in the field with customers and show them real-time visual representations of solutions, make changes to configurations, and instantly obtain accurate prices.

The new CPQ system enables Fujitsu to stream-line the sales process by placing a significant portion of the product data and configuration rules directly within the quoting application. The sales team is able to operate more independently and to focus on selling.