Bit2win for E.ON:
Increase sales and accelerate quote-to-cash process with Bit2win Omnichannel Sales Suite
Reading time: 5 minutes
“Bit2win is very customer focused CPQ system that fits to the energy market. The team is consistently enhancing the solution, taking into account our targets and goals to dynamically meet our needs.”
Matthias Merz| Head of Product & Calculation at E.ON
Matthias Merz
Head of Product & Calculation @E.ON
Matthias Merz
Head of Product & Calculation @E.ON
01
WORKING WITH BIT2WIN
How did you get to know Bit2win and how long have you been working together?
What kind of relationship did you build with Bit2win as a company and as people, partnering to achieve the same goal?
We are shifting more and more customers from our Legacy system onto Salesforce and Bit2win step-by-step as soon as we have the necessary product and process features in place. Bit2win is supporting us in operations with difficult topics but also consulting us on the architecture and implementation.
With Bit2win people we had daily contact and it was a really good working: we got a good support from operational consulting to strategic direction, defining training initiative and studying commercial topics.
We have 2-4 people from Bit2win continuously on board to guide our ~20 cross company salesforece developers that work on the product management topics and help new developers to onboard via trainings and replying to their questions on a quarterly basis we discuss with b2w management and engineering team on how we can improve the solution for E.ON.
We can actively bring suggestion which then might be included in the Bit2win standard functionality.
This helps us to further improve the collaboration and brings a “win- win situation” for both parties.
02
Before Bit2win
The main goal of the next question is to understand the gap filled by Bit2win, what solution were you used to apply before Bit2win?
Our legacy system is a combination of SAP CRM and the energy industry ERP solution SAP IS-U. Product management related functionality has been customized. As discussed before, for each combination of product features, a new “product” with a unique ID has been created in the system which hindered the creation of new product propositions due to exponential increase of product IDs.
Also the product and price information was splitted into different systems where we now have one single point of truth.
Why did you choose the Bit2win solution?
We did a tender for a new software core for their sales business. The winning bid included Bit2win as the salesforce module for product management.
03
STRENGHTS AND IMPROVEMENTS
I can guess this situation helped you solve some issues, so, what are the problem that Bit2win helped you to solve?
We sell energy commodity products like gas and power but also non-commodities like smartphones, wall-boxes or solar panels. In our legacy system environment we need to create a new customer facing product for each configuration, e.g. eco options or price guarantees. This leads to a lot of work in the product management and pricing departments and also reduces customer flexibility to choose and un-choose such options.
So we were looking for a product management system to improve and optimize this issue. Accenture recommend us Bit2win with their solution.
Product Catalog
With Bit2win we created a modular product catalogue that enables us to define add-ons, discounts and options in a flexible way.
Product Configuration
With using Bit2win product configuration functionality we gave the business product managers the power to configure and steer the process of product creation by themself without support from the IT department.
So, if I would ask you to sum up the two main benefit from Bit2win, its team and solution, what would you say?
Speed
As a company, Bit2win’s product management solution helped us to be more flexible: we gain speed and that led us to be in a good position.
Support
The other advantage we benefited from was the amazing support in the project and operations: whenever we had a problem we put it on the roadmap and Bit2win people implemented in a very short time, and whenever we had whenever we have had urgencies they solved them quickly.
What are the feedback from people who use it on a daily basis?
There is 4 groups using the Bit2win solution:
Developers:
They focus on the implementation of the E.ON product model and the connection to the sales channels. The software is generally received as very flexible to meet customer requirements.
Product Managers:
Energy products are regularly going into new versions of Terms &Conditions and prices.
This process has been supported by implementing a customized E.ON process for the version upgrade. With this, automation has been increased a lot and the pure process duration has been cut from weeks to days.
Channel Responsibles:
The channel repsonsibles need a reliable single-point-of-truth for the product and price data and a good performance. We implemented Bit2win as a central source. Issues in performance were improved due to the implementation of a more specific interface with less payload from Bit2win for us. Here, the benefits of the modular product catalogue come to show as we are now able to provide flexible add-ons to base products.
Call Center Agents:
They need a self-explanatory shopping cart-based system to configure and sell products. Also here, the modular product catalogue feature is the main difference to the past. This enables us to do better up- and cross-sell.
So, if I understand well it has an impact on business and sales from the process’ point of view, am I wrong?
Exactly, by the way there were two main reason to implement the whole solution, which include Bit2win:
- The first one was to improve customer satisfaction in SAF service
- The other one was to enable and to improve cross selling, Bit2win, especially, helped a lot to meet this need.
Keep focusing on the benefits, what are the results that Bit2win helped you to achieve? Do you have any KPIs to help us better understand these benefits?
I will start with the results, if I have to sum up, I will say:
01
Enable a modular product catalogue with cross- and up-sell
02
Implement a stringent, quick process for the regular update of products (Neuauflage) with a reduced time to market
03
Improved flexibility in product configuration
We can see a quantitative benefit inside the “Neuauflagen” process, a process where we update products settings and specifics.
it’s a regular process that we were used to do it in around 3 weeks for all the products.
After the Bit2win implementation this process concludes in 3 days.
What are the strengths of the solution, according to your experience?
Flexibility
Multichannel
Integration
Let’s now talk about what Bit2win can do better: what kind of advice would you give Bit2win for improvement?
Improving developer usability could be a key point for the performance and the cost of implementation projects. In fact, some features are still a little bit complex to understand. Nevertheless, Bit2win offers a complete training program that helps and guides developers in understanding and using all CPQ features.
04
CHALLENGE
What about the pandemic emergency challenges? Did Bit2win help you in some ways to quickly react to them?
Our challenge related to the pandemic emergency was the increase of the gas prices, we needed to change our offers quickly and our tools and softwares helped us to quickly react to it.
Did it also impact in the “smart-working” process?
Yes, since Bit2win is part of the Salesforce suite, it helps in allowing our employees to access to the system through a full cloud application. With the older solution, this would have never been possible.
05
VALUES
Thanks a lot Matthias! Let’s now proceed with the las question: would you briefly describe Bit2win based on the values you perceived and the solution you purchased?
Bit2win is a very flexible CPQ system that fits to the energy market. It needs an initial invest to setup the industry and company specific ruleset by experts. Bit2win is very customer focused and enhancing their product directly on the feedback that we give.
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