For contract manufacturing and engineered products companies, the quoting process starts with a request from a customer for a product that does not exist. Today’s Customer Resource Management (CRM), Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ), and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools assume that every possible option, material, or feature already exists and has a price. But to enable a quoting process that delivers real, actionable cost and profit information, the solution is Cost-Based Quoting powered by ImpactECS.
Cost-Based Quoting (CBQ) is more than just a workflow process used by the sales team to generate a document. CBQ supports all three phases of the quoting process – inventing the product, costing and pricing the product, and presenting the quote and tracking its performance.
The CBQ process includes a management and control system that provides workflow, approval, oversight, and analysis of the process. Ultimately, a properly executed CBQ process brings consistency, accuracy, and speed to the effort.
ImpactECS links detailed BOM and routing data, sourcing and vendor data, and other relevant expenses to create a powerful analysis and simulation platform that provides meaningful results. The answers from ImpactECS can help guide negotiations with customers and monitor cost and profit performance of ongoing or long-term agreements.
Also, connect ImpactECS with CRM solutions like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and others to create a fully integrated quoting process and eliminate fictional ERP data and ad hoc spreadsheet quotes with limited cost insights.
Traditional CPQ applications presume that every possible option or feature for a new product is already invented, costed, and priced. In an engineer-to-order world, this presumption falls apart. Successfully quoting new business requires inventing, costing, and pricing the product before a quote is sent to the customer.
Read the article to learn more about our three phase approach to costing for new products, new customers or new quotes.