Hyster-Yale lifts sales with Oracle Cloud
“Oracle CPQ is improving our forecasting and production planning, and helping our dealers convert more quotes into more sales.”
Business challenges
After being spun off from NACCO Industries in 2012 and then completing numerous acquisitions, lift-truck manufacturer Hyster-Yale was overwhelmed with data generated by disparate business systems, ranging from an aging online truck configurator to spreadsheet order forms and home-grown quoting tools.The company had limited visibility into its manufacturing operations in 12 countries, making it difficult to fulfill orders from its rapidly expanding customer base and schedule deliveries with its global distribution network.
Oracle CPQ gives us one global platform that tells every user instantly what part goes with what truck. It lets any one of our hundreds of dealers go into the system and configure the right options.
Why Hyster-Yale chose Oracle
Hyster-Yale chose Oracle CPQ to standardize configuration workflows on one global platform for 700 truck models and hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of parts.
While the company had piloted a quoting tool from another vendor, that tool failed to provide a single global system on which dealers could configure complex products, approve quotes, and process orders. Halfway through its Oracle CPQ implementation, Hyster-Yale was already thinking about what it could do next.
Results
Since Hyster-Yale went live with Oracle CPQ in early 2017, it has unified four separate sales processes globally, quoted hundreds of thousands of product configurations, processed more than 100,00 orders, and built and shipped more than 50,000 trucks.
With Oracle CPQ, part of the Oracle Cloud CX suite of customer experience applications, Hyster-Yale’s dealers can get instant visibility into pricing contracts, the specifications and availability of products, and customer purchase histories by region.
The cloud platform also provides the company’s 700-salesperson dealer network, which drives 70 percent of the company’s business, with one system that they can use to produce error-free configurations of very complex products.
In cases where the company’s national sales reps need to offer discount pricing to dealers in order to close a sale, they can use the rules-based workflow engine built into Oracle CPQ to get instant approvals, rather than have to spend weeks exchanging emails and phone calls to get those discounts approved.
Oracle CPQ is also providing Hyster-Yale with near real-time intelligence about customers, their industries, what pipeline stages they’re in, and the kind of trucks those customers have requested quotes for. Not only is this insight providing better visibility into the company’s pipeline and close rates, but it’s also helping it analyze reseller trends based on industry and regional configurations.