Estimating is arguably one of, if not the, most important processes for manufacturers today. Ensuring that your products and services are sold at the right price can be imperative in ensuring a company is successful. There is a fine line between being both cost effective and profitable, so what can you do in order to find this balance and how can an ERP system help?
Ensure quotes are produced efficiently
Speeding up your quoting process will benefit your company in many ways. First and foremost, your customers (or new prospects) are going to receive their quotes back quicker, which in turn suggests that customer service is high on your agenda. It will allow your estimators to use their time more productively, by following up on existing quotes or seeking new business. An easy to use and intuitive ERP can help by streamlining and reducing the number of hours consumed by this process. MIE Trak Pro has the ability to copy previous quotes and templates, along with the functionality to import data from spreadsheets, CAD files and even PDFs, which means the days of having to manually enter every piece of information from scratch are long gone.
Accurate quotes across the company.
Producing quotes efficiently is great, but ensuring that the quotes being sent are accurate is no doubt even more important. A large part of being able to quote accurately comes down to experience. Someone who has been quoting for 20 years will have more experience, expertise and logic to work with compared to someone who has been doing it for 5 minutes. But what if that logic could be shared amongst everyone in the company, regardless of how long they have been quoting for? A completely customisable, questions based, quoting system can be implemented with ERP software. Rather than have the estimator guess how long a job would take at each manufacturing step (with different people potentially having a different answer based on their interpretation), a list of questions can be presented on the screen which require “black or white” answers, which in turn then uses the formula logic set up in the system to do the hard work and calculate the time for you.
Make informed decisions based on historical data.
Have you ever wondered if you are charging enough or even charging too much for your products and services? Feedback from customers can be a vital indication as to whether you are at one extreme or the other. Also, feedback from the shop floor as to how much it’s actually costing can help you identify the jobs that are profitable and those that are not. ERP with live KPI and reporting functionality gives you access to essential data that can help identify these trends and can be presented either graphically or in PDF report format. This data can then be assessed and scrutinised in order to plan business improvements moving forward.
