About Automated Systems of Tacoma (AST)
Automated Systems of Tacoma (AST) has over 50 years of experience designing, manufacturing and servicing innovative, high quality, and highly automated processing equipment. Beginning in 2006, AST leveraged their experience and close customer relationships to revolutionize the aseptic fill/finish industry with the launch of the ASEPTiCell® development. Using robotics and advanced automation, the ASEPTiCell® was the industry’s first aseptic multi-format fill/finish machine capable of processing Ready-to-Use nested vials, cartridges, and syringes on the same line. Today, AST is proud to offer their customers a range of products and services to support their drug product development as well as their clinical and commercial fill/finish requirements. Since its beginning, AST has delivered innovative solutions – many of which were industry firsts and have since become industry standards. AST has always understood that their customers serve demanding and oftentimes unpredictable markets.
AST’s Challenge
AST builds highly configurable machines and that complexity carries over to price quotes for customers. The quoting system that was already in place was really nothing more than a combination of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel with some complicated formulas and clunky automation built using Microsoft Visual Basic code. It worked. Quotes could get generated, but it took several days to get a quote built and through all the right hoops. Yet they still required extensive review since some of the effort was manual. Not to mention all the extra effort required to have the data available for use in forecasting and reporting.
The Salesforce CPQ Solution
AST decided Salesforce CPQ was the answer to not only increase the speed and accuracy of quotes for their customers, but also improve the efficiency of their internal teams. AST chose ITequality as their implementation partner at the recommendation of their Salesforce Account Executive, who based that recommendation on the side-by-side approach to implementations that ITequality offers. Utilizing this method, ITequality implements CPQ by teaching clients not just what to do, but more importantly, why to configure in a certain way. This better sets up the client for a successful implementation, and in fact, goes beyond that and helps the client become as self-sufficient as they desire for future improvements.
The Business Development team at AST has been doing more and more of their quotes in CPQ and they are really happy with how streamlined their process is.
“The time saved through generating quotes with CPQ is invaluable and has greatly improved marketing and business development efficiency across the board” says Brittany Hoff, Media Marketing Manager at AST. She also states, “ITequality has been a tremendous asset in improving our operations to match pace with our growth as a company and it has been exciting to see our quoting process become so streamlined.”
Additionally, the Salesforce team at AST demonstrated CPQ to their CEO, who stated that he is really happy with it and can see the value it will bring to the organization through efficiency gains.
