Resource-intensive quotations – much sales effort due to costing and constant changes

Sales costs money. Long sales cycles cost more money. Complex quotations without successful conclusion cost the most.

Working efficiently is every sales organisation’s objective. Available means shall yield maximum results. Each quotation shall hit the mark. Reality is different, though. Potential customers often only want to obtain information, customer-specific quotations must be tailored, constant changes of requirements must be reprocessed. Responding to the demands and requirements of customers and communicating with them is especially decisive in business fields which are strongly characterised by customer-specific specifications. It is decisive to find the right measure and harmonize sales efforts and success in these cases. A good CRM system helps with that but also ERP systems require functions supporting sales.

Quotations include articles, volumes, deadlines and prices. If the prices cannot be simply obtained from the price list, they must be costed. This pricing process is decisive for many companies and hence also for companies in the print and packaging industry. Each product printed with a customer’s design is customer-specific, and each change in volume or deadline influences the price.

An ideal ERP system supports sales, recognises all price-relevant changes in the quotation and calculates new proposed prices. New or changed components influence material prices, larger order volumes reduce unit prices, discounts or surcharges for individual components (or the entire order) influence the total price. During quotation costing, the seller accesses the live data of the ERP system and uses them for the calculation. This allows direct access to current material and machine prices, surcharges and availabilities.

Each change in the quotation is assigned a version and can thus be tracked and/or evaluated in retrospect. A transparent representation of the costing result facilitates verification and communication with the customer. All costing components are displayed with different colour codes, manual changes are possible and comments on changes can be stored.

Standard systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations frequently provide extensive tools for calculations. However, the effort to calculate a product completely for a quotation is still huge. Articles, parts list and work plan must be prepared thoroughly. For quick quotations and price information for interested parties, this effort is often too much.

Add-on modules or recently apps for ERP systems can assist in special cases and map individual functions in detail without requiring extensive changes of the system standard. COSMO CONSULT’s quick calculation module is a configurator which – completely integrated into the ERP system – allows the configuration of new products, calculates all price-relevant components, prepares quotations in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM module and supports changing quotations easily. The user-friendly frontend only requires entering price-relevant factors. The system does not create an article in the article master data, and approval and acceptance procedures are optional.

No piece of information is lost. All entries and quotation components can be transferred to and completed and accepted in the article master data and product management. Duplicate or subsequent recording in inside sales with renewed efforts and an increased risk of input errors is not necessary.

The seller has thus achieved his objective. Quick and accurate price information, simple and inexpensive management of quotations and all changes is possible. Not only do sales costs decrease but also accuracy and relevance of quotations increase.