(Source: Business Wire)BigMachines, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand configuration and proposal software, announced today that Rolls-Royce Energy Systems, the global power systems company, has been honored by Manufacturing Business Technology Magazine with the Most Innovative Process Award, in the publication's 2009 Innovation Insight Award competition, for its use of BigMachines' product configuration platform. Since implementing the BigMachines solution in July 2008, Rolls-Royce Energy has drastically reduced the timing of its quote approval process and is on track to realize a ROI of more than $4.5 million on this project over the next three years.

Rolls-Royce Energy is a world leader in providing power systems and services with customers in nearly 120 countries. In early 2008, the company struggled to keep up with customer requests for quotes on the company's oil and gas and power generation equipment. The quotes that did make it to the customer were sometimes inaccurate, which posed a potential threat to the company's profit margins. Rolls-Royce Energy turned to BigMachines to help create a Web-based solution called the Product Proposal Configurator (PPC), which gave the sales team instant access to all of the information needed to generate fast and accurate cost information.

"BigMachines is a very flexible solution that has successfully handled our most complicated configurations and financial analyses," said Jennifer Bell, Program Manager at Rolls-Royce Energy Systems. "We looked at other products, but we were impressed with the capabilities of the BigMachines application and its ability to integrate with our existing systems. With BigMachines, our sales team has been able to streamline the quoting process."

Because the Product Proposal Configurator is Web-based, sales people can generate quotes at any time, from any site -- including the customer site -- while also holding all of the company's cost and proposal information in a single location. The solution has served to reduce bid support department time, marketing department time and engineering time by thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of hours per year, adding up to substantial labor savings for the company.

"We are pleased that Rolls-Royce has been recognized for this well-deserved honor," said Godard Abel, CEO and co-founder of BigMachines.