Equipment Selection Software: What It Is and How It Boosts Your Bottom Line

Some equipment that’s made by manufacturers requires selection before it can be priced. Equipment selection software enables sales teams to select, price, and quote the right products to meet the intended design performance all in one integrated solution.

What is Equipment Selection?

For complex products, or products that have to meet a specific set of performance criteria based on the environment where they’ll be used, certain information needs to be determined just to be able to find the right product for a given specification. A great example of this is air conditioning and other HVAC equipment. With a lot of air conditioning equipment, design conditions have to be input and calculations must be made in order to select and get the performance of a piece of equipment.

Air conditioning equipment has things like heat transfer coils, motors, fans that all have to deal with different conditions because the environment is changing. Design engineers and sales reps have to enter those design conditions in order to determine the performance of the equipment. Typically, this all has to be done before the equipment is priced.

Types of Products that Need Equipment Selection

Common Examples of Equipment Selection Criteria

• Residential, Commercial, or Industrial
• Compatibility of Options and Accessories
• And Other Design Parameters

Why is Equipment Selection Software Important?

Equipment Selection Software For Sales Reps

For a sales rep, equipment selection software is extremely important. The old way of doing it would be looking it up on PDF interpolating tables and doing manual calculations or contacting the factory and having them do it. Manufacturers can streamline the process for sales reps by providing a user friendly web-based tool that is integrated with the configuration pricing and provides the results. The performance results of the equipment and to obtain the correct model and price of the equipment so that the equipment can then be priced and quoted. In many cases there are electrical calculations, heat transfer calculations, links to third-party DLLs and also loops which optimize the best equipment for the conditions that the user has entered.

Equipment Selection Software For Manufacturers

Because all of these pieces of equipment perform at different levels at different conditions. And it is critical that when the equipment is delivered to the customer that the equipment performs per the desired performance. So merely pricing a piece of equipment like this isn’t good enough. It also requires selection.

Equipment Selection Software for Architects, Engineers, and Consultants

There are also purchase influencers such as consulting engineers architects and designers who may also want to use the program to select the best equipment and build specifications so that a sales rep can quote it later on. Typically, these users may not have access to pricing but they would love to have the ability to select the right products for the design conditions. The advantage to the manufacturer is that the responsibility is on the designer to select the right piece of equipment and then the responsibility of the sales rep would be to to price what the designer has selected.  That way the responsibilities and liabilities of the of picking the right equipment moves from the manufacturer to the design professionals and the sales reps.

How Can Selection Software Boost My Bottom Line?

#1 – Reduce Order Errors

Orders that don’t work in the field and require field modifications can be extremely costly. Manufacturers of building equipment such as air conditioning have felt these effects for years. What often happens is the sales rep quotes the job, but doesn’t put it in accurately, and then when the equipment arrives at the job site if it doesn’t perform to the expectations of the designer. Then, equipment has to be replaced and a lot of times the manufacturer spends a lot of money correcting the problem and also their reputation is hurt.

#2 – Get Specified More Often

Manufacturers often find that when their products are easier for architects, consultants or engineers to specify into projects, the volume of jobs they are specced for increases. Being the specified product leads to an increase in sales by 70% or more.

#3 – Increased Productivity At All Levels

Freeing manufacturer employees to focus on other tasks, empowering architects, consultants, and engineers to get the data they need quickly, and allowing sales reps to generate accurate quotes quickly. These up-front time savers lead to downstream efficiencies too with less time spent dealing with problems, patching client relationships, or processing returns. It’s a true win-win for all involved.