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 an 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.