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With ambitions to shape the future of global media technology, MediaKind Inc is a multinational media technology company that helps customers create immersive live and on-demand mobile and multiscreen media experiences. Carved out of a divestiture from Ericsson Corporation, MediaKind enables content providers, broadcasters, and service providers to securely and reliably acquire live content and transition it smoothly through satellite, IP, and the cloud to studios and operators around the world.
Its portfolio of end-to-end media solutions includes Emmy Award–winning video compression for contribution and direct-to-consumer video service distribution, advertising and content personalization, high-efficiency cloud DVR, and TV and video delivery platforms.
In the multiscreen, multiplatform world, encoding and packaging video content so that it’s suitable for the consumer and delivered at the right level of quality and reliability comes with an exhaustive list of variables. With extensive product lists and endless configuration possibilities, the pricing and quoting experience for salespeople and customers alike is a highly complex affair.
Overhauling legacy systems
With MediaKind’s legacy configuration, pricing, and quotation practices steeped in long-established manual processes, it took days for salespeople to produce finished quotes. With price lists, materials, and customer data housed in disparate systems, sales reps were required to rekey information from one system to another. And, before completing the quote, the proposal needed to be brought under the purview of the technical sales support team to review and validate the details.
Intent on accelerating the quoting process to improve the customer experience by speeding its response, MediaKind chose to leave these legacy practices behind. In their place, the firm sought a more dynamic quoting and configuration experience befitting the immersive live and on-demand mobile and multiscreen media experiences it helped customers create.
Marrying sales tools with accurate business information
With its sales reps needing to draw on hardware, software, and professional services components in their quotes, it was essential to marry MediaKind’s quoting processes with accurate, real-time data.
Having built its business landscape on intelligent infrastructure for ERP, MediaKind chose the SAP CPQ solution integrated with SAP S/4HANA and the SAP Customer Experience portfolio. Centralizing its configuration data in one common hub and pulling data from its Intelligent ERP has eliminated the need for dual systems and minimized the need for technical sales support oversight.
MediaKind selected MOURI Tech for design, implementation, and solution architecture support. Through strategic design and dedicated functional and technical leads, MediaKind transformed its configuration, pricing, and quoting system into a fluid lead-to-cash process, empowering its sales team to respond faster to customer needs and delivering more value.
Salespeople can now configure complex quotes using their smartphone or tablet devices, guiding their customers through the process, step by step. Automated workflows within SAP CPQ empower them to reflect their customers’ specific and unique needs across multiple industries, in different languages, and using various currencies. And with rules embedded in the workflow, salespeople can also factor in discounts in near-real time without having to seek approvals. When they need to consult with others, they simply save incomplete quotes to the cloud, ready for collaboration. Once final, salespeople continue using the tool to publish the quotes as professional proposals with clearly laid out pricing, the exact bill of materials, and terms and conditions.
With integrated solutions, MediaKind’s salespeople now have more insight around the deals they make – including forecasts, actuals, revenue, and billings – across the entire sales lifecycle.
Operating at the vanguard of end-to-end media technology solutions, MediaKind’s pricing and quotation system is now ideally suited to its task: equipping the sales team to produce finished proposals for highly complex configurations in hours instead of days.
To learn more about how the SAP CPQ solution integrated with SAP S/4HANA has transformed MediaKind’s lead-to-cash process, read the business transformation study, “MediaKind: Reshaping Sales Configuration, Pricing, Quoting to Match Immersive Media Experiences.”
