CPQ Insights: Konica Minolta
Building a unified CPQ Landscape
In the evolving world of digital printing and IT services, Konica Minolta stands as a global technology leader with a rich legacy of innovation stretching over 150 years. With their headquarters in Tokyo Konica Minolta employs over 44,000 employees worldwide, 9,000 of them in Europe. The company has long been synonymous with excellence in production printing, office technology, and digital transformation. But how does such an established organization navigate the growing complexity of its digital landscape?
At the CPQ Forum Jörg Bittenbinder, Enterprise Product Configurator Manager Europe, and Benjamin Licht, Product Owner Enterprise Product Configurator, offered deep insights into the company’s journey with CAS Merlin CPQ.
Navigating complexity and inconsistency across sales processes
Their presentation revealed that Konica Minolta’s digital transformation journey had already been in progress when the need for a unified platform became clear. Across its European subsidiaries, different configuration tools and manual workflows had evolved independently. This led to high maintenance effort, inconsistent data, and nonsynchronous system updates and impacted the daily work of the sales teams.
Sales teams faced daily challenges of unverified configurations, incorrect pricing, logistical delays, and error-prone manual processes that made quotation and order management both time-consuming and costly. Konica Minolta asked themselves: How do we help our teams navigate through this?
The vision: one central configurator
Recognizing these challenges, the goal was to establish a central CPQ seamlessly integrated with Konica Minolta’s ERP landscape. The new tool had to ensure data integrity, automate processes, and simplify complex product configurations, and integrate the user from the beginning. A key goal was not only to simplify internal processes but also to create a unified experience for more than 3,500 sales users across 23 European countries.
Integrating various ERP systems, synchronizing data, and ensuring compatibility with document generation and marketing tools were major challenges while implementing CPQ. So how did Konica Minolta overcome these obstacles?
How did CPQ become the central tool for unifying sales processes across 23 countries?
Konica Minolta implemented CAS Merlin CPQ: a rule-based configuration environment that ensures complete data flow between ERP and CPQ, embedding users directly into an automated end-to-end process. It serves as Europe’s central configuration platform bridging marketing and service operations while connecting all key processes and systems. With more than 2.6 million offers generated annually and a usage rate of 99% among sales representatives, the system has become a fundamental part of daily operations.
Sales CPQ became the primary sales tool, providing a workflow from configuration and pricing to provisioning. Meanwhile, Customer CPQ was introduced as a public B2C platform for transparent product information, connected through a REST-API based eCommerce portal.
The outcome: a unified CPQ landscape
Today, CAS Merlin CPQ is deeply embedded in Konica Minolta’s European sales and service ecosystem. The benefits have been substantial: manual effort and operational cost have been drastically reduced, data quality and consistency have improved, and sales teams can now create complex quotations faster and more reliably than ever before. CAS Merlin CPQ supports both internal and external users, offering the flexibility needed for highly individual product configurations while maintaining control through standardized, validated configuration logic.
The integration of CAS Merlin CPQ in Konica Minolta has not only streamlined processes but also laid the foundation for ongoing digital innovation, empowering Konica Minolta to continue shaping the future of digital business solutions.
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