Quote to shop order

In the current climate/landscape of increasing costs and aggressively priced competitors, margins can be squeezed and businesses who do not have control of their manufacturing costs can suffer.

As a manufacturing company being able to easily and accurately cost potential jobs at the point of quotation can be crucial in providing your customer with a price that while remaining competitive does not run the risk of becoming non-profitable.  

Creating the bill of materials and accurately costing all the different elements can be time consuming and often a very manual process. Listing the materials required, what routing processes will be used to manufacture the goods and the time it will take for each of these is no small task. Once completed the resulting cost information can be used effectively to mark up and achieve the desired profit margin.

However, the arduous process is not complete, if the customer comes back and requests an amendment or a better price. You will then be forced back to the Excel spreadsheet or paper copy. Being able to access the original quotation and easily make amendments is in the best interest of the business.

From the original quote a sales order is then created, again this can be time consuming and repetitive. With all the information needed already on the quote it is inefficient to retype or write it, not to mention prone to error

After painstakingly making sure your sales order is identical to the quotation,the sales invoice needs to be raised. All the information previously contained on the original quote and the exact replica sales order must be entered again. Yet more time and effort required making sure the information is transferred correctly to the invoice which can now be sent to the customer

The production manager must then know what it is they need to be making and when the customer is expecting it. Time to copy the bill of material information we created for the quote to a shop order and send it off to be manufactured.

The production manager will now make sure the material required to complete the order is available. Checking stock levels manually can be time consuming and inefficient. If there is a material shortage the production manager must find out where we source the material from and produce a purchase order to ensure we can get the materials in and fulfil our customer order.

Quote to Shop Order can be a fairly drawn out process. It can often be very manual and involving repetition and time which could be better spent adding value to the business.

In summary

• Being able to create a multi-level bill of materials or edit an existing one as part of the quote creation process. Including not only the materials required to complete the job but also the routing process gives a business detailed insight into the actual costs associated with a job.
• Removing duplication of work by taking the information from the quote and using it to automatically create a sales and shop order as well as then converting it into a sales invoice. Lowering the chance of input error while at the same time freeing up employee hours better used elsewhere.
• Having a system which can automatically check your stock levels based on material requirements from a shop order and offer advice on which materials need to be purchased and potentially which supplier should be used.

All these things individually offer real value to businesses but together they can completely streamline the way a company operates.    

Software systems to manage these business processes were previously only utilised by larger companies. This was due in part to the expense, both in terms of the software and the hardware required to run it, along with the lengthy implementation timeframes. However, advances in cloud technology and the introduction of SAAS have made these systems far more accessible and affordable to all companies, regardless of size.

If your business could benefit from a solution to help manage processes such as quote to shop order and multi-level bill of materials then please contact us.