About Nidec Industrial Solutions

Nidec Industrial Solutions (nidec-avtron) is based in Northeast Ohio and develops, produces and sells top-quality American engineered Avtron Encoders for industrial applications worldwide. Avtron Encoders are the world’s largest-selling brand of heavy and harsh duty encoders. They are sold to a wide range of industries from paper mills to metals, mining, wind power and oil & gas drilling. Anywhere an encoder failure would cost money and downtime, you need an Avtron Encoder.

The Challenge

Nidec-Avtron’s sales team was using an Excel spreadsheet with over ONE MILLION cells of formulas used to try to configure one of 40 different encoder products. One person managed the incredibly complex spreadsheet and adding a new product could take thirty to fourty hours. The sales team had to create a quote for a customer instead of letting the customer do it themselves. Spreadsheet documents were being created for each quote and the look of the resulting printed quote was clunky, unprofessional and did not meet Nidec’s branding standards. In addition, there was no automation to enter a contact or opportunity into Nidec’s Salesforce CRM so the sales team had to manually enter and manage these. Finally, there was no easy way to report on how effective the sales team’s efforts were or roll up results for managers and executives.

The Vision

The ideal solution would be online and integrated with Nidec’s website. It would allow for easy selection of a configurable encoder while providing custom pricing options depending on discounts or multipliers offered to specific customers. The result would be a PDF built specifically for the customer that maintained Nidec’s brand standards and uploaded directly to Nidec’s Salesforce CRM.

About The Visionary

The Encoder Product Manager knew his sales and pricing team could be far more efficient if they had an online tool that let customers configure their own encoder and generate a quote and even more so if the quote was automatically uploaded into their Salesforce CRM where the team could then follow up on it.