About the Client

Our client is a global manufacturer of high-performance sealing solutions and engineered components. Their products are built to the most demanding tolerances in the world — designed for semiconductor fabrication equipment, aerospace systems, life sciences instrumentation, and energy infrastructure.

They don’t sell off a shelf. Every deal involves a spec. Every quote touches engineering, pricing, and operations before it reaches a customer. And the systems that support that process weren’t connected, including Salesforce, SAP, 3D Design and PLM systems.

Three Systems, One Quote, No Connection

Here’s what the pre-transformation picture actually looked like:

• Sales built quotes manually, pulling data across three disconnected systems. No single source of truth.
• Pricing pulled from SAP was batch-updated, not real-time. Quotes could go to customers with stale numbers.
• Approval workflows were inconsistent — or non-existent. Governance was enforced by habit, not by the system.
• Catalog parts were a big friction point inside a complex product book.
• Multi-currency quoting across global regions added another layer of manual handling on top of everything else.

For a manufacturer selling into industries where precision and reliability aren’t optional, like semiconductor, aerospace, life sciences, and energy, the operational risk was real.

What ForeFront Brought: Manufacturing Fluency, Not Just Salesforce Knowledge

Most Salesforce partners would have started with CPQ configuration. ForeFront started with the business model.

Precision manufacturers don’t sell the way distribution companies or SaaS vendors do. Product data originates in PLM, not Salesforce. Cost and pricing data originates in ERP, not spreadsheets. The sales team is coordinating across engineering, operations, and finance on every deal — before a quote ever goes out.

When you understand that, the technical requirements become obvious. When you don’t, you build a system that’s technically configured but operationally wrong.

ForeFront has delivered Salesforce transformations across manufacturers running SAP, Oracle, Epicor, and Infor environments. We know what it takes to build a Salesforce solution that reflects how a manufacturer actually operates — from the product data model to the quoting and margin approval chain to the ERP handoff.

What We Built Together

Quoting rebuilt from the ground up.

We designed the CPQ configuration around how this manufacturer sells — custom project structures for engineered-to-order products, dynamic approval, multi-currency quoting for global regions, and a UI/UX redesign that made the system usable, not just deployed.

SAP connected in real time.

We built bi-directional integration between Salesforce and SAP across the full quote-to-order data model: accounts, contacts, products, list pricing, real-time customer pricing, quote simulation, orders, cost data, and currency exchange. Sales teams can now build a quote against live SAP data before it leaves the building.

Engineering and sales connected for the first time.

We integrated Salesforce with a 3D Design & PLM system, linking engineered product specifications directly to sales workflows. For a company whose products begin with an engineering spec, this was the critical connection that had been missing. Sales and engineering now operate from shared product data. Fewer errors. Less rework. Faster cycle times.

Catalog Quoting fixed.

We redesigned Standard products end to end, rethinking how they’re structured, surfaced, and quoted. What was once a bottleneck now runs as a smooth, scalable workflow.

A long-term operating model.

After initial delivery, the client moved to a dedicated team Managed Services partnership with ForeFront. That’s what happens when a manufacturer finds a partner who knows their business well enough to keep improving it.