From months of manual proposals to a single click
Nanostuffs delivered Salesforce Service Cloud and Steelbrick CPQ for Veolia Water Technologies — replacing a fragmented global CRM and a manual, error-prone proposal process with one governed platform that configures complex water-treatment systems and generates complete, consistent proposals automatically.
A water-treatment proposal can run to hundreds of pages. Built by hand, with no version control, a single missed term or specification could turn into a costly commercial problem — and each one took months to assemble. That was the process Veolia needed to change.
How the CPQ platform works
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At a glance
Client
Veolia Water Technologies — global leader in water treatment
Challenge
Fragmented regional CRMs; complex proposals built manually over months with no version control
Solution
Salesforce Service Cloud + Steelbrick CPQ — one global platform with automated proposal generation
Result
Months of manual proposal work reduced to one-click generation plus a 2–3 day review
A global sales operation running on disconnected regional tools
Veolia Water Technologies designs and supplies water-treatment systems and projects for industrial and municipal clients worldwide. Its sales and proposal operation spanned business units across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East — each running its own combination of CRM, spreadsheets and local configuration tools.
That fragmentation had two costs. There was no single view of the customer across regions, and no common way to manage leads, opportunities and quotes. But the sharper problem was in the proposals themselves. A water-treatment proposal is a large, technical document — hundreds of pages covering process design, equipment specifications, drawings, pricing, terms and conditions. These were assembled largely by hand.
Manual assembly at that scale is slow and fragile. A single proposal could take months to produce. There was no reliable version control, so keeping a long document internally consistent was difficult — and in a business where a missed term, exclusion or specification can carry real commercial and safety consequences, that fragility was a genuine risk, not just an inconvenience.
Engagement Snapshot
- Industry
- Water treatment
- Geography
- Global — EU, Americas, APAC, ME
- Core platform
- Service Cloud + Steelbrick CPQ
- Integration
- ERP & product-data systems
- Products
- 8,300+ in catalogue
Why Service Cloud + Steelbrick CPQ was the right core
Configuring and quoting engineered products has a specific shape: a large catalogue, rules that govern which components go together, local pricing, staged approvals, and complex document output. Salesforce Service Cloud provides the unified CRM system of record; Steelbrick (Salesforce CPQ) is purpose-built for exactly the configure-price-quote problem Veolia faced. Together they replace a patchwork of regional tools with one governed platform.
Rather than build a bespoke configurator, Nanostuffs used CPQ as the engine and extended it where Veolia's business needed something specific — the water-treatment product logic, the cost-sheet output, the ERP integration. That combination of a proven platform plus targeted engineering is what makes a global CPQ rollout maintainable rather than a per-region rebuild.
What Service Cloud + Steelbrick CPQ handles natively
- A unified CRM across regions — leads, accounts, opportunities and activities in one system of record
- Rules-driven product configuration from a catalogue of thousands of products
- Local currencies, languages, price lists and business rules from one core model
- Multi-stage technical and commercial approval workflows with a full audit trail
Where custom engineering was needed
The hard part CPQ couldn't solve out of the box was Veolia's specific proposal output and the water-treatment configuration logic — turning a configured system into a complete, correct, hundreds-of-pages proposal, and connecting the quote to ERP pricing and order creation. That's where Nanostuffs built.
What we built
01 · Layer
Service Cloud CRM
Unified leads, accounts, opportunities and activities across every region — replacing disconnected local CRMs with one customer view.
Service Cloud02 · Layer
Steelbrick CPQ
Rules-driven configuration of multi-component water-treatment systems, with local pricing, approvals, and automated proposal generation.
Salesforce CPQ03 · Layer
ERP & product data
Integrated with Veolia's ERP for live part pricing and automatic order creation, and with product-data systems for equipment documentation.
ERP ↔ CPQTurning a month of manual assembly into one governed click
The toughest requirement wasn't the CRM — it was the proposal. A Veolia water-treatment proposal is a large technical document assembled from many moving parts: the configured system (often several products working together — a softener, a reverse-osmosis unit, tanks, pumps, instruments), each with its own specifications, drawings and documentation; a detailed internal cost sheet; process descriptions; and pages of commercial terms and conditions. Doing this by hand, per proposal, took months and left no reliable version control.
The complexity underneath is real. Configuring a system means selecting compatible products from a catalogue of thousands, applying the rules that determine what fits together, and pulling the right technical content and pricing for each — while respecting the currency, language and price list of whichever business unit the user belongs to. Then every proposal has to pass technical and commercial approval before it reaches the customer. Automating that isn't a template exercise; it's modelling the whole configure-price-quote logic in one governed system.
The fix wasn't a faster document team — it was moving the entire proposal from manual assembly into a governed CPQ model, so the document becomes an output, not a task.
Nanostuffs modelled Veolia's products, rules, pricing and approval workflow in Steelbrick CPQ, and built the proposal generation on top of it. Once a user configures a system and it clears technical and commercial approval, the full proposal — specifications, drawings, cost sheet, terms — is generated at a click, complete and internally consistent, with version control built in. What remains is review, not construction: a 2–3 day check rather than months of assembly. And because the document is generated from a governed core model, a term or specification can no longer be silently missed.
Before
- Fragmented CRM and configuration tools across global business units — no single customer view
- Hundreds-of-pages proposals assembled manually, taking months per proposal
- No reliable version control — keeping long documents consistent was difficult and error-prone
- Risk that a missed term, exclusion or specification could become a commercial problem
After
- One Service Cloud + CPQ platform across all regions, with local currencies, languages and pricing
- Full proposals generated at a click — months of manual work reduced to a 2–3 day review
- Version control and a governed core model built in — every proposal complete and consistent
- Technical and commercial approvals enforced in-platform, with a full audit trail
How we delivered it
A scoped, phased global delivery — proving the platform on a pilot before rolling out region by region, so a large multi-country programme stayed controlled at every step.
Discovery & core model
Mapped the lead-to-order process, defined a common core model across business units, and set the configuration, pricing and approval rules.
Pilot build
Built and proved Service Cloud + CPQ on a pilot business unit with an initial product set, validating configuration and proposal generation before scaling.
Integrations
Connected CPQ to ERP for live pricing and automatic order creation, and to product-data systems for equipment documentation.
Global rollout
Rolled out region by region across Europe, the Americas, APAC and the Middle East, with local currencies, languages and price lists.
What changed for Veolia Water Technologies
Real numbers only — pending metrics await client-approved data.
proposal generation, then a 2–3 day review
missed terms — governed, version-controlled output
rollout across EU, Americas, APAC & Middle East
products modelled in the CPQ catalogue
A proposal process that once took months and risked costly errors now runs in days, consistently, across Veolia's global operation — turning quoting from a bottleneck into a repeatable, governed step.
Service Cloud + Steelbrick CPQ — common questions
Quoting complex products through slow, manual processes?
We build Salesforce CPQ platforms that turn months of manual proposal work into governed, one-click generation — at global scale.
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