A Forestry Industry Leader’s Journey to Streamlined Offer Management with SAP CPQ

To negotiate effectively, today’s sales teams need speed, consistency, and transparency. Yet many enterprises struggle to equip them with timely, relevant information—hindering their ability to engage customers with confidence and close deals efficiently. One of our customers, a leading forestry-sector enterprise in Eastern Europe, was keen to address this challenge as it initiated a large-scale ERP renewal program to modernize processes and harmonize operations across multiple business areas.

As part of a multi-year ERP renewal program, the organization was migrating from legacy SAP ECC systems to a unified S/4HANA environment. While this transition addressed many backend modernization needs, the offer management and agreement process faced one critical gap: the organization lacked a centralized system that was structured to create, approve, and manage offers. Since offer management and agreement process is a high-volume, high-stakes activity which involved sales users preparing complex pricelists for their customers which had to be competitive in the market and profitable for the business. Hence creating the correct pricelists was a challenging task for sales users which needed multiple data points to be considered.

One major challenge was disjointed tools that required considerable manual intervention. There was limited visibility of the profitability of each product and the costs involved, which caused bottlenecks in the approval process and audit gaps. The organization was using Excel and email chains, which delayed the sales cycles. Pricelist documents were created manually which were prone to errors and omissions.

Integrating a fragmented Process with SAP CPQ

It was clear that the business needed a state-of-the-art CPQ solution, and SAP CPQ was the ideal choice to fill the process gaps in the sales funnel. In the client’s sales ecosystem, leads are first generated and nurtured in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Once qualified, these leads move into the offer and agreement stage, which will be now managed through SAP CPQ. After the offer is finalized and accepted, the sales orders can be created in reference to the agreement in SAP S/4HANA. This ensures that execution is tightly aligned with the promised deliverable to the customer.

This critical middle layer between CRM and S/4HANA, SAP CPQ offers a robust and cloud-native solution which could automate complex pricing logic, streamline approvals, and generate legally compliant documentation end-to-end. In SAP CPQ customer offers will be created, priced, approved, and documented, to serve the purpose of bringing structure, control, and speed to a process that was previously fragmented and manual.

Implementing an end-to-end Workflow

As a strategic system integrator, Infosys partnered closely with the client organization to implement SAP CPQ for the sales and marketing transformation.

• Single CPQ-driven workflow

In the harmonized SAP S/4HANA landscape the SAP CPQ solution had to be aligned into a single CPQ-driven workflow which addressed to the requirements of all business units.  The template solution provided a base for all business units which catered to the common requirements. And the business specific rollout incorporated each business specific features into the CPQ solution.

•  Automated approvals

SAP CPQ implementation now triggers approvals when the predefined thresholds, such as discount limits, offer value ceilings, surcharges, etc., are crossed. Senior officials, who are approvers, receive notifications in real-time. This has ensured compliance across the board and faster turnaround times.

• Creation of offer documents

CPQ provides document templates, which can be used to generate offer documents in PDF based on which the data populated into the quote. Since legal and commercial accuracy is maintained, the PDFs can be submitted to the customers without any need for manual intervention.

• Centralized pricing master

SAP CPQ solution will be the centralized pricing master integrated with S/4HANA. Prices are agreed with the customers during offer stages and once confirmed, prices are pushed to SAP S/4HANA system. Sales orders created in SAP S/4HANA system will then fetch valid, agreed-upon prices, ensuring alignment between the offers and orders. This eliminates the practice of uploading prices via Excel sheets into the ERP, which was not just laborious but also prone to errors.

• Transparency

Every offer now carries a complete digital footprint, capturing who created it, who approved it, what version was used for the sales order, and when each change was made. This level of transparency has become invaluable, especially during audits, internal reviews, customer negotiations, or any situation where clear traceability and accountability are essential.

Impact on Business

The transformation has already begun delivering meaningful business impact, even as formal reporting continues. Automated approvals have improved the offer turnaround times, while eliminating manual price uploads has significantly reduced errors. With a single, centralized system now driving offer creation, the sales user experience has become more consistent, and the overall sales process more compliant and governed. Sales teams are also seeing productivity gains from a streamlined, user-friendly workflow.

Infosys helped enable this shift by combining deep SAP CPQ expertise with strong domain understanding. Given the niche nature of the product, the team needed to architect complex enhancements while ensuring the solution remained scalable and compliant. Infosys also helped harmonize processes across distinct business areas, guiding stakeholders toward a unified operating model.

Beyond technical implementation, Infosys provided design leadership, helping the organization visualize how the new solution would function, how sales behaviors would change, and how CRM, CPQ, and SAP S/4HANA would work together as a connected ecosystem.