Fluiconnecto by Manuli

Fluiconnecto Conquers the After-sales Market with Tremendous Time Savings and Margins

Benefits

• Dramatic time savings in service inspection and analysis.
• Access to current, complete and error-free information.
• Flexible and scalable software.
• Seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Fluiconnecto by Manuli is a leading international service organization focused on high-pressure hoses and fluid connectors. They provide products, application engineering knowledge and maintenance services to market segments including construction, agriculture, marine, mining, and oil and gas.

Challenge

The company devotes much of its business to providing equipment lifecycle management, which means they spend a lot of time calculating service inspections. For a bulldozer, this can be an easy task. Fluiconnecto handles huge and complicated equipment—for example, dredging vessels. Before CPQ, the company might spend weeks simply checking all engines and parts packed with high-pressure hoses and fluid connectors. To complicate matters, customers couldn’t afford the harbor’s downtime for a complete inspection, so Fluiconnecto needed to send a service inspector sailing away with the vessel. Inspectors literally couldn’t get back to work until a ship docked and most often required to take a plane from a far-flung location.

That’s a lot of time and expense lost from the start. Also, because an at-sea inspection process wasn’t automated or connected to the business database, the inspector manually recorded all needed parts and repairs and only later keyed them into the system. Fluiconnecto prides itself on lean efficiency, so the company was frustrated by the amount of time and money spent before essential maintenance and service could begin. They wanted solutions, starting with implementing Microsoft Dynamics for both Sales and Finance and Operations.

Solution

Fluiconnecto knew that the standard configurator functionality in Dynamics 365 wasn’t enough for their needs, so they went on a search for the best CPQ tool. They needed to meet three main criteria:

• The CPQ tool must be a fully Microsoft Dynamics Certified Application (CfMD)
• The CPQ tool must be available and supported globally
• The CPQ tool must always be upgradable with newer Dynamics 365 versions without obstacles and customizations

Fluiconnecto by Manuli believes in the ecosystem Dynamics 365 offers, so it wasn’t long before they decided on a CPQ solution. As the most reliable CPQ tool available for Microsoft Dynamics, it was a logical choice.

Result

Fluiconnecto by Manuli will be implementing CPQ for all service inspections for vessels and ships. CPQ can handle the daunting task of working with thousands of assemblies of hoses and connectors and different specs for each item. Indeed, with CPQ, they can conquer the after-sales market and see healthy margins.

To start, all information is current, complete, and accessible from any location. CPQ also connects directly with the asset table in Dynamics 365 Field Service. Using CPQ on a tablet, a service inspector knows what specific items are in an assembly. After keying in all needed information, CPQ generates maintenance advice and contract. Fluiconnecto has also discovered that CPQ is powerful and flexible enough to handle the massive amounts of information needed for automated, error-free service contracts. Indeed, CPQ proves to be the most potent project calculation tool that Fluiconnecto by Manuli ever has seen.

To illustrate the business case Fluiconnecto by Manuli is making: With CPQ, a service inspector can analyze a vessel in less than five days when a ship is temporarily in a harbor. Right now, it could take 5-8 weeks to go onboard a vessel and do all the math during a sail. Using CPQ will save weeks per service inspection. All information is digital, so it’s much easier to access or share information. With 30 engineers working at any given time, Fluiconnecto will realize enormous savings using CPQ.