Growth drives Hoosier Crane’s need for Configure One services

Hoosier Crane Service needed support from Configure One, a leading producer of quote-to-production software, for one of the best possible reasons: exponential growth.

Now in its 15th year, the company’s three branches (one in Chicago and two others in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne) have recently seen 40 percent year-over-year growth, said Eric Graybill, the firm’s chief financial officer.

“We’ve been growing fast enough that we need to onboard new salespeople and help our existing salespeople be more efficient in their quoting process,” said Joe St. Clair, Hoosier’s IT director. The company’s customers comprise steel and heavy equipment manufacturers, auto and RV makers, and construction and light-industrial clients. Currently, the process to generate a quote involves various third-party software tools, Excel spreadsheets, and engineering calculators.

The parameters involved in specing a quote involve dozens of options, including span width, load capacity, remote controls, warning devices and electrical voltage of sub-components.

“With the large amount of manufacturing we’ve been doing, we’re looking to standardize our bills of materials, which is right now a manual process,” St. Clair explained. “The intention is to have a lot of that process automated.”

Using Configure One’s tools will offer up-front help with standardizing Hoosier Crane’s quoting process and training its sales staff quickly and more efficiently, St. Clair said. Down the road, the company expects to expand use of the software suite’s dynamic drawing creation tools, for both realtime 2D drawings or 3D images.

The finished quote will also be streamlined and will look similar from project to project, St. Clair said, replacing the current manual system of assembling bits and pieces with variations into Adobe Acrobat.

Hoosier Crane is also looking to integrate with NetSuite, a cloud-based enterprise resource management platform Configure One implements with many of its software installations.

“We’re fairly early into the process, which is still in the development stages,” St. Clair said. “When we do integrate, one of the benefits will be that it’s going to tie our product catalogue of available parts and inventory items into Configure One so it can load those products into the bill of materials without having to manually put those in as we currently do.”

About Configure One Configure One is a leading provider of web-based product configurator and CPQ (configure price quote) software. Configure One’s Enterprise Product Configurator® is an enterprise CPQ application that enables companies to efficiently sell and process orders for configurable, multi-option, and customizable products and services. Configure One’s customers can increase revenues while reducing costs by automating much of the sales, order entry, and engineering processes. Customers include industry leaders such as Alstom, Vertiv, Dover Corporation, Masonite Corporation, Otis Elevator, SPX Corporation, Stanley Black & Decker, and Sumitomo.