RHI Magnesita Builds a Scalable CPQ Foundation with Conga

Challenge

When you operate more than 70 production plants across a variety of industries, commercial consistency isn't optional, it's imperative. For RHI Magnesita, a global leader in high-grade refractory products, systems, and services, the friction became clear in pricing first: managers across the business were each running their own strategies, with no shared approach.

About a decade ago, the company set out to fix that. They built a proprietary pricing engine to bring consistency to their commercial operations. And it worked — until it didn't. The homegrown technology eventually reached its limits, and a more modern solution became unavoidable. 

But the challenge wasn't simply replacing an inadequate system. RHI Magnesita needed to determine where technology could make the greatest immediate impact while also supporting a broader, long-term commercial strategy. The team concluded that strengthening its configure, price, and quote (CPQ) execution should come first, followed by more modern pricing technology. 

That meant finding a partner with the scalability, solutions, and capabilities to support both priorities.

Solution

RHI Magnesita conducted an extensive 10-month vendor selection process. The project was led by a dedicated internal team to ensure the decision aligned with the company's technology requirements and business goals. Each solution went through a rigorous evaluation to determine whether it could scale to meet the complexity of a global organization with 20,000 employees, and also fit within the company's broader IT strategy.

Conga stood out in part because of its native integration with Microsoft Dynamics, RHI Magnesita's CRM. Just as importantly, Conga offered robust capabilities across both CPQ and price optimization, giving the company a technology partner that aligned with its longer-term roadmap.

RHI Magnesita selected Conga Smart CPQ for their technology needs and chose Conga Professional Services for implementation. The teams spent two months working together on planning and preparation before rolling out the software to the larger organization. Combined with a fully dedicated internal project team, that upfront investment helped RHI Magnesita and Conga establish shared priorities and ways of working together before engaging the broader user base.

Results

With the go-live date approaching, RHI Magnesita had already created a strong foundation for its CPQ transformation. Rather than pursuing a “big bang” deployment, they worked with Conga to roll out an initial solution that is manageable today and designed to scale over time.

Business engagement was central to that approach. Approximately 200 employees worldwide participated in the project kickoff, where the dedicated implementation team shared its CPQ vision and demonstrated the solution. The company’s Chief Customer Officer was also involved in that kickoff, which reinforced executive commitment to the project. And an Agile design and configuration process enabled the team to gather feedback from internal users as early as possible.

That combination of planning, executive sponsorship, user engagement, and close collaboration with Conga Professional Services positioned RHI Magnesita for both a successful go-live and the broader commercial transformation it plans to pursue over the long term.