AUGUST 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8recast concrete dates as far back as 1300 BC when Middle Easterners melted limestone to cover their clay homes. Centuries later, Romans poured limestone crushed rock, and soft sand into wooden forms to build their sprawling network of aqueducts, culverts, and tunnels. Today precast concrete provides infrastructure solutions to communities, businesses, and homeowners the world over.Construction companies use precast concrete to build bridges, tunnels, and highways above ground and sewer, stormwater, and drainage systems underground. Cast into standard and custom forms, then delivered ready to install at job sites, precast concrete products offer reliable quality, rapid project completion, cost control, and onsite resource efficiencies.Until recently, engineering, manufacturing, pricing, and inventorying of precast concrete products have lacked the same efficiencies of their many uses. Prices might vary depending on manufacturing locations, customer expectations, and contracted timelines. Engineering resources might spend time meticulously specifying product bids only to lose out to competitors with entirely different solutions. Precaster has inventory sitting at various manufacturing locations and does not connect the dots for delivering sizeable products to meet customer demands at nearby project sites.The design, engineering, manufacturing, and delivery continuum of precast concrete can take months to realize. Timing everything to land on deadline requires masterful foresight and may send costs soaring when expectations fall short. The alternative method of concrete cast in place at a job site can mean longer lag times in constructing wooden frames to form poured concrete and more resource costs to carry out key tasks on schedule. Cast in place can also be ineffective for hard to reach installations as well as sites with tight spacing demands.Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software may offer a way to advance the precast concrete industry by accelerating the order to delivery time.Focus AreasWhat are the primary focus areas for considering a CPQ solution? First, let's look at obstacles the industry is trying to overcome. The main challenges for a lot of precast concrete companies today can be summarized into three key areas.Price OpportunityFor many businesses, the sales team is quoting products before the engineering team designs them. This incongruency can lead to pricing that repeatedly misses the mark.Mass Customization The near-impossible task of pre-engineering all permutations of Configure to Order (CTO) and Engineer to Order (ETO) concrete products usually means more customization, which means more time and more costs for manufacturers and their customers.Scale Deficiency An inability to keep up with market demand for custom products can impact potential manufacturer revenue. If every major job requires customized products, marshalling the resources to deliver incoming orders on schedule may be cost prohibitive.These types of challenges may result in and are compounded by too many customer communication loops. Given the high stakes of indeterminate profit margins, deadline driven contracts, and time-sensitive outcomes, these obstacles can be frustrating on both sides of the business-customer relationship. A measured and integrated approach to the CPQ process offers the promise of aligning disparate team goals into a streamlined business process where everyone is literally on the same page via data-driven software configurations shared alongside the design-bid-build customer product journey. More value is added when pivotal decisions made throughout the project stream are communicated and not lost in later stages. THE PROMISE OF CPQ FOR PRECASTPJOSHUA MYERS, VP OF ENGINEERING, JENSEN PRECASTIN MY View
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