Instron manufactures, markets and services materials testing instruments, systems, software and accessories used to evaluate the mechanical properties and performance of metals, plastics, composites, textiles, ceramics, rubber, biomedical, adhesives and other materials. Instron’s applications technology is used by research scientists, design engineers and quality control managers in industry, academia and government. Due to the scope of its international operations and range of products, Instron is considered to be the world’s leading full service materials testing company.

Our sales force consists of Account Management Teams (AMT) in our North America operations. These teams include inside Account Representatives and outside Sales Engineers. Administrative Assistants support the Account Management Teams. There are many demanding and challenging sales situations which require close and accurate communication between our inside and outside sales teams. 

We are avid users of GoldMine and synchronize information back and forth routinely to communicate this information. We were missing the ability to link our quotes to these accounts and synchronize them to the field personnel as well as to e-mail the quotes directly to our customers.

In 1998 Instron Corporation was faced with a situation where quoting its highly configurable and highly complex products, demanded a system that could be implemented rather quickly to gain the necessary efficiencies in the sales administration area. This had to be a quoting system that was pretty intuitive in order to be acceptable to the sales staff (both inside and outside), and it had to be an “easy to do business with” tool that worked well with all our surrounding processes. It also had to have significant efficiency gains to reduce and eliminate the “paper blob” in the sales area and produce a crisp, clean, and professional looking quotation to our customers.

Here was a challenge, unmatched by others in the past, to seek out such a system and get it implemented as soon as possible to relieve the current backlog of quotes that were building up in the fourth quarter of that year. A number of systems were looked at and considered, however, none that matched the capabilities and features that QuoteWerks had to offer.

QuoteWerks became the answer for Instron.

Not only did it meet all of our needs at that time, today we are using QuoteWerks 3.0 as a corporate product and have over 125 installations throughout the world. With the outstanding support that Aspire Technologies has given us, we have installed QuoteWerks 3.0 throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. QuoteWerks does it all for us! As a corporation, we are using it to generate sales quotations globally, optimizing  our unified (worldwide) price database. In addition, we are now converting quotes to orders within QuoteWerks and through our email system we are sending them electronically to Order Entry in our corporate office. It has made life so much easier for us to manage the business in the sales area. We are now beginning to explore and utilize the management reports which QuoteWerks has to offer. 

For Instron, QuoteWerks truly is “the way quoting should be.”

Brian Warren
Sr. Marketing/Sales Administration Manager
100 Royall Street
Canton, MA 02021-1089

Visit us at www.instron.com or www.buyinstron.com