CCW Integration: The Top 5 Benefits of an Integrated Quoting Process

By Rafi Epstein

Costing sources that today’s ICT VARs and Cisco Partners need to connect with, live in a variety of silos. It is because of this, that VAR quoting can be and for the most part, is a major challenge without CCW integration.

Let’s take Cisco’s CCW for example. The way this mandatory configuration tool is used for sourcing cost presents many challenges. One of them is the way that the source data is formatted. As in all quoting, a Cisco quoting solution needs to take the formatting into account.

With CCW and other costing sources such as CCW-R and VIP, Cisco leads the way in utilizing a proprietary data format. This makes it difficult for you to use and adapt to your quoting needs.

Let’s take an example from a Cisco Partner. This type of VAR typically relies on exported BOMs from costing sources such as CCW.

These BOMs may reach hundreds and thousands of items, making manual methods unusable.

Challenges

VARs waste valuable time when merging prices, incentives, discounts and delivery data .
You can automate this work, and configure excel templates and writing scripts. However, it isn’t a sure fire way to deal with this pricing source.
CCW does not take into account End-customer pricing, only VAR Cost.

All this costing data needs to be unified in a solitary workspace. It then, must be prepared for every aspect of quoting, everything from Pricing to VIP rebates.

Because of this deluge of data, preparing and bringing it into a solitary workspace in-house is a highly complicated and error-prone process.

Light at the End of the Quoting Tunnel

What you need is comprehensive CCW integration and/or integration with Tech Data, Ingram Micro, via API. Following this, intelligent data parsing allows for the preparation of the data that is brought into the quoting workspace. Here are 5 Primary Benefits:

Eliminates human errors due to manual copy/paste operations
Solves accuracy issues
Increases workflow efficiency and cuts down on time consumption.
Accelerates time to quote
Close more Deals, faster

Separate to Prepare the Data

The solution is to separate the availability and pricing interface into a data parsing and API phase. You then can prepare the data for the flow into your workspace. With successful CCW integration, once the data is prepared and resides in the workspace, this scenario is an opportunity for you to resolve: