The Costly Labor Concerns for OEMs Selling and Servicing Custom Products
The current labor landscape presents a significant and costly challenge for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as they navigate the complexities of configuring and delivering custom products to their customers. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) recently highlighted that three-quarters (67%) of manufacturers cite the inability to attract and retain a quality workforce as their primary business concern. Labor concerns extend beyond simple HR issues; they are proving to be a strategic vulnerability for several reasons.
As experienced personnel retire, they take invaluable “tribal knowledge” with them and consequently leave potential giant gaps in critical sales and operational processes. For OEMs specializing in configure-to-order (CTO) or engineer-to-order (ETO) products, reliance on manual, time-intensive processes, often dependent on specific individuals or skills, becomes a bottleneck and a risk for ongoing efficient operations that meet increasing customer demands. Whether product configuration, pricing, or delivery of CAD assets, resources across several functions are required in the delivery of a custom product quote.
Fast forward to the shop floor, where your skilled frontline workers are tasked with assembling the required components and products on the shop floor (or in the field). How can you standardize work instructions to ensure production speed and maintain quality if your experts are exiting the workforce?
Once in the field, how can OEMs ensure that they help end customers minimize downtime through post-sale services and frictionless genuine spare part sales and delivery? If the OEM parts identification and sales process continues to be manual and time-consuming, customers will likely turn to the path of least resistance, potentially including purchasing non-genuine parts, to get their equipment up and running as soon as possible. While you may have some parts experts on your service team, skilled labor challenges will continue to present roadblocks in your parts identification and recurring process, eroding customer trust.
How can you future-proof your custom product sales and lifecycle management in the face of persistent labor pressures? Digitization offers a powerful path forward, transforming knowledge into a resilient digital asset. Let’s examine the four key areas where immediate digitization can protect your processes and profitability.
The Top Four Areas OEMs Should Prioritize Digitization for Knowledge Capture in the Sales Process
1.) Product Configuration, Pricing, and Quoting Processes
Generating accurate configurations, prices, and quotes for complex configure-to-order (CTO) and engineered-to-order (ETO) products typically depends heavily on engineers or seasoned experts and their accumulated “tribal knowledge” within their function. The dependence creates significant bottlenecks and risks when key personnel leave or are unavailable to assist with the sales process for customized products.
When selling customized products, there are several key dependencies for sales representatives to obtain a quick and accurate quote related to product configurations. They rely heavily on technical knowledge from engineers, expertise from the pricing team, and the ability to quote exactly what the customer needs, including any technical documentation required for the sale. Considering the wealth of knowledge required across these key functions for a customer quote, digitizing knowledge in each part of the sales process is essential for a frictionless sales process for customized products.
Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software directly addresses this by digitizing each area of critical expertise in the initial sales of custom products. CPQ systems codify complex product rules, dependencies, and pricing logic into a centralized, accessible platform that effectively transforms tacit knowledge into tangible digital information, supporting and automating the sales process for new equipment.
The benefits are immediate: sales teams, even newer members, can quickly and accurately configure complex solutions, ensuring valid combinations and consistent pricing without relying solely on engineering or veteran salespeople. CPQ software accelerates the entire quote-to-order process, reduces errors, protects margins, and, crucially, makes your sales process resilient against workforce changes.
2.) Automating Repetitive CAD Work for Custom Products
CTO and ETO products typically require delivering accurate resource-intensive technical documentation like CAD drawings and models as part of the sales process. The requirement creates bottlenecks caused by manual drafting and reliance on specialized engineering knowledge to build and maintain CAD assets throughout the sales process. The bottlenecks slow down the velocity of a sale and force engineers to spend more time on manual tasks over new product innovations.
Automating repetitive CAD development tasks can be a powerful digital solution that directly addresses the challenges caused by manual drafting and reliance on specialized engineering knowledge for every major or minor detail change in a product configuration. Instead of valuable engineers manually creating or modifying designs for each sales request, CAD automation systems generate these critical outputs on demand by leveraging the specific configuration details defined in a CPQ and applying pre-defined engineering logic and constraints to produce a range of essential outputs instantly.
Through CAD automation, sales reps (end users) can instantly generate customer-facing sales drawings, detailed 2D manufacturing drawings, interactive 3D models for visualization, technical data sheets, and even preliminary bills of materials (BOMs) without the need for engineering resources. Effectively digitizing the repeatable aspects of design variation, engineering knowledge can be scaled directly into an automated workflow, delivering a faster sales process with accurate technical documentation that builds resilience against the impacts of workforce changes and expert availability.
3.) Component and Product Assembly on the Shop Floor and Field Repairs
The challenge of maintaining assembly consistency and quality for custom products intensifies with skilled labor shortages and the retirement of experienced technicians, risking the loss of invaluable “tribal knowledge.” Without step-by-step work instructions to support SOPs, onboarding new hires and training workers to perform complex tasks are major hurdles, especially under pressure to maintain speed and quality. Digitizing assembly knowledge is crucial for scalable training.
Digital Work Instructions directly address this vulnerability on the shop floor and in the field for your skilled frontline workers. By capturing best-practice procedures from your experts, digital work instructions transform static procedures and undocumented techniques into standardized, easy-to-follow digital guides that can be enriched with images, videos, and 2D and 3D interactive models.
Capturing assembly processes and building a connected workforce through digital work instructions makes critical assembly knowledge explicit and accessible to all your frontline staff. They help empower newer technicians to perform complex tasks correctly, accelerating onboarding, reducing errors, and ensuring consistent quality. Digitizing tribal knowledge future-proofs your frontline operations to be far more scalable and resilient against workforce turnover and evolving labor conditions.
4.) Genuine Spare Parts Identification and Procurement
Post-sale service support for OEMs is crucial for ensuring customers use genuine parts, minimizing costly equipment downtime, and maintaining satisfaction throughout the product lifecycle. However, navigating spare parts identification typically relies on outdated methods, such as paper or PDF catalogs, with customers or support staff trying to identify the exact part needed without any clear indicators. In some cases, a few experts may hold that knowledge, but if they are unavailable, it does little to solve the problem of properly identifying the spare part needed for the repair.
The back and forth creates friction that frustrates customers needing quick repairs to minimize downtime, potentially driving them toward non-genuine alternatives that jeopardize long-term OEM revenue streams and customer relationships as equipment ages and requires more maintenance. Providing technicians with easy tools to identify and purchase genuine spare parts they need, along with instructions on how to complete the repair, ensures that you minimize end customers’ downtime and build long-term trust.
Digitizing the parts identification and procurement process through visual platforms, including e-commerce, gives anyone the means to identify and purchase spare parts regardless of their expertise. It democratizes part identification, enabling anyone, from customers and field technicians to dealers and internal staff, across any channel to quickly and accurately pinpoint the right genuine OEM part. The streamlined accessibility ensures faster procurement, supports the longevity of equipment in the field, secures vital genuine parts revenue, and makes this critical support function resilient to workforce constraints.
Digitize Knowledge in Your Sales Process to Future-Proof Your Business with CDS Visual
It is critical for OEMs to future-proof their sales and support lifecycle against labor uncertainties by digitizing knowledge across the entire process, from configuration and CAD automation to assembly instructions and spare parts identification. CDS Visual helps OEMs digitize product knowledge to create a scalable and future-proof sales process with consistent, expert, and AI-powered support for your customers and products throughout the complete product lifecycle.
Ready to transform these critical processes and safeguard your operations? Contact us today to schedule a personalized one-on-one consultation.
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