Waterman Industries Goes Live with BuyDesign® Configurator

Waterman Industries Using TDCI Product Configurator with Infor ERP SyteLine to Quote, Order and Manufacture Water Control and Irrigation Equipment

Columbus, OH (PRWEB) June 3, 2009 -- TDCI Inc. (TDCI), the leading provider of configurator-based software solutions, announced today that Waterman Industries, a leading manufacturer of water control and irrigation equipment, is now using TDCI's BuyDesign Configurator integrated with the company's Infor ERP SyteLine 8 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to streamline quoting, ordering and manufacturing of the company's configure-to-order products.

A component of TDCI's BuyDesign guided selling and configuration solution suite, BuyDesign Configurator is a highly flexible product configurator that makes it easy to capture product knowledge in the form of product rules and constraints. It then guides users through product specification, calculates product pricing, and generates a wide range of configuration-specific outputs such as manufacturing information, drawings, CAD models, documents and more.

Many of Waterman Industries products can be configured to customer specifications. For instance, water gates can have different types of materials, different opening sizes, and various options and add-ons. Before BuyDesign Configurator, customer service personnel used price books and worksheets to manually create quotes and determine what product variation to order. Manufacturing had to maintain separate bills of material (BOMs) and routings for all potential configurations. With BuyDesign Configurator, Waterman has automated the configuration and quoting process, reducing it to a matter of minutes. When orders are placed, BuyDesign Configurator automatically generates all of the configuration-specific manufacturing information and passes it to SyteLine to drive production.

"Our people can now do quotes while the customer is on the phone rather than take information and call back," says John Rogers, Waterman Industries Systems Analyst and Project Leader. "More importantly, we now know all quotes will be accurate and consistent - that wasn't always the case with the manual approach."

Since Waterman Industries did not use a product configurator before, product information had to be captured for the first time. That was done by a cross-functional team for the first product in just 3 weeks. "The process of building the BuyDesign product models was pretty straight-forward" adds Rogers. "In fact, it has given us a much better understanding of exactly how our products are made. We now have a lot of product knowledge captured in our configurator rules."

About Waterman Industries
Waterman Industries has been providing water control and irrigation solutions since 1912. With facilities in Exeter, California, Waterman manufactures products such as gates, valves, level controls, hydrants, filters and specialty items. Waterman products are sold globally to the agricultural industry and municipal water authorities through both direct sales reps and dealers. Customers range from large municipal water works such as MWD in Los Angeles and DEP in New York City to international corporations such as Disney, Chevron and ARAMCO. To learn more about Waterman Industries, visit www.watermanusa.com.

About TDCI and BuyDesign
TDCI (www.tdci.com) specializes in helping manufacturers and their distributors streamline the buying process for customized products. TDCI's BuyDesign® software is a comprehensive web-based guided selling and configuration solution developed to help companies increase sales by becoming 'easy to do business with' while improving profitability by reducing order processing time, cost, and errors. Built using a powerful product configurator, BuyDesign provides modular applications for guided product selection and configuration, product visualization, quoting and ordering, drawing and data generation, consumer interest creation, and more.

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