Help: I'm Tired of Errors in Sales Quotes and Long Lead Times

[salestigermoon]

So, I am currently working in the manufacturing industry as a Sales Manager. We design and produce refrigerated display counters, display cabinets, cold rooms and freezer rooms. Within our company we have different departments such as sales, engineering and production with different systems being used. A flawless flow of information between our departments is key, as I need information from other systems (such as CAD, PDM and ERP) as input for my sales quotes. For instance, I might need to retrieve pricing information from ERP and process it into my sales quote tool.

In my daily work, I struggle with spending an enormous amount of my time on manually putting this information from other systems into my quote tool. Most importantly, having to do this manually results in errors in my sales quotations and long lead times.

I'm very curious to learn about your situation. Do you experience similar problems with errors in quotes and long lead times as a result of poor system integration? And what would be the ideal solution to fix my problems?

 

[The Byre]

In my days running a news agency for trade magazines, I saw cases like yours again and again and again and again. And mostly in countries and/or industries where muddling through is the norm - Italy and the UK featured high on the list.

In an ideal world, these systems are part of one integrated whole and not bookkeeping over here and financial management over there and stock control and ERP somewhere else. The only real answer is to talk to people like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft and see who makes the most sense for you and your company.

Of course, that does mean having to de-trouser some money on proper software systems and train everyone in how to use that software.

SAP's 4Hana is really good for financial planning, GL capabilities, product-costing, but a bit basic for CRM. Oracle is great for very large companies. Microsoft's Dynamics 365 is great at CRM and is very customisable.

Going by what you have written, your first call should probably be to SAP.

 

[Newchodge]

Hopefully, someone will be along very soon with a perfect system to cover these issues.

 

[IanSuth]

My wife works in distribution, they use a system called Strategix which i think is now owned by KCS (who were Kerridge computer systems and started off in producing an integrated system for car dealerships sold on a Wang minicomputer), She describes it as clunky but comprehensive.

Kerridge Commercial Systems United Kingdom

At KCS we deliver cloud-based ERP business software to the distribution, automotive, and rental trades in the UK to help them trade more profitably.

www.kerridgecs.com

I have no skin in this game, just as i used to work in IT recruitment for 26 yrs i know a lot of the software houses and their histories/specialisms

 

[CloudERP]

Hi guys,

I'm still not sure about the advertising rules on the forum so I'll just say that there are systems out there to combine, sales/CRM/Inventory. I work for one right now and happy to advise should you have any questions.

 

[Paul FilmMaker]

I worked for Salesforce, Oracle and have customers like Workbooks. They all have CRM systems which automatically populate sales quotes, raise invoices etc...

 

[rajeshk]

I'm an independent IT consultant working in SME & Fortune 100s for the last 20 years. In my experience, both business & IT were trying to solve these issues for a very long time. Unfortunately, there's no quick fix or easy solution as the solutions to these issues are from various providers with their own pros / cons. Reality is - Need multiple vendors that syphons the solutions to day-to-day issues.

Primarily - Identify your requirements & choose a best fit software (leverage growth projections for the next 'x' years)
Second - Have the right team skilled in the above software & motivated towards the companies objectives.

Choose software that get you off the ground really quick & let you mould along your way. As suggested above, Salesforce, Microsoft CRM, Oracle, SAP are more for a serious enterprises.
Whereas light weight CRMs like Moday.com, Pipedrive, Salesdrive are for SMEs

 

[UkAppCoder]

Alternatively, if you can't find a ready-made solution, or you want to avoid over-complicating your system, you might consider a custom solution.

Many applications have an application programming interface (API). There are common protocols, standards, etc., which enable you to write separate applications which draw on your tech stack to produce custom integrations. You could start with minimal functionality which satisfies your immediate requirements (e.g. the automation of your quoting system), then develop it as required. If there is no API, then you may be able to use low level sockets, but you would need access to the source code, which is probably not possible for compiled systems.

So, use APIs to orchestrate different application fragments written in different languages. Central or disparate databases can also be integrated.

It is unlikely that there is a single ready made orchestrator for that subset of your particular application set which provides the means to do what you want. Even if there were one or more, it would probably be quite difficult to integrate these integrations.

The following seems to be a decent layman's article on this subject. I've only scanned it, but it appears to go a little further than I have above:

What is an API integration? (for non-technical people)

Learn what APIs are and why they are a critical piece to building automated workflows that can get rid of time-consuming manual labor.

tray.io

Hope this helps.

 

[Paul FilmMaker]

So this is a solution that works for a manufacturing company. It's a CRM system that also does the things you want. This is the head of operations in one of their customers which had very similar challenges to yours and they solved those issues using Workbooks:

Also, this is another customer of theirs, again, a manufacturer, which had bigger challenges on the same kind of lines and fixed them using Workbooks:

Disclosure: They're a customer of ours and we do all their video production.