Key Capabilities

QuotationBuilder has been designed to offer functionality in the following key areas:

• Tracking existing Quotations and facilitating conversion to Sales Orders
• Improved Communication and collaboration amongst everyone in the Quotation cycle
• Flexible pricing
• Customisable attributes and calculations
• An easily maintainable and synchronised product and customer database

Find out here how these key capabilities can help you

Tracking existing Quotations and facilitating conversion to Sales Orders

A quotation is the start of the sales cycle. Once the customer confirms the order the sales staff can convert an existing quotation into a sales order. The sales order can either stay within the system for historical quotation success analysis, or be sent automatically to an ERP system, such as SAP, to start the sales order process. Integration with an ERP system saves time and prevents errors.

Improved Communication and collaboration amongst everone in the Quotation cycle

A team is at its peak performance when messages are being effectively communicated between its members. Effective communication implies correct information transmitted in a timely fashion. The rewards of good communication are to eradicate costly miscommunications and avoid missed opportunities.

QuotationBuilder enables you to stream line your communication lines by providing your sales staff the information they need when they need it, in the format they need it in.

The system offers many feature that facilitate communication and collaboration between the sales and the product teams. Below are just a few;

• Follow-up reminders to remind your sales staff to chase a client and track the communication with the client
• Customisable sales analysis reports
• Customisable quotation documents in none-editable PDF format or editable RTF format
• Email integration that can automatically send a quotation to the client.
• User group access control; accesses of a quotation may be shared between a number of sales teams
• Document attachments and tracking; specifications, request or drawings can be attached to the quotation or a quotation line

Flexible Pricing

The calculation of the quotation price is usually very particular to your company. Many manufactures take into account different factors depending on the nature of the product, the market they are selling into, and the trading conditions.

Listed here are some of the many tools that can be used to implement a pricing structure in QuotationBuilder. However, any pricing strategy can be modelled using the system. The system may even use multiple pricing strategies that can be automatically selected depending on the conditions of the quotation;

• Customer price list
• Margin calculation and setting by quotation and quotation line
• Pricing based on commodity prices such as Copper or Aluminium
• Customised material price per material contained in a product
• What-if analysis on material prices per Quotation
• Estimation of product lead time
• Pricing based on the length ordered
• Automatic discount based on quantity
• Transport cost
• Taxation and export duties
• Currency conversion

Customisable attributes and calculations

Your company is unique in the way you trade and interact with your customers and internal staff. This uniqueness is the real factor that makes you competitive in a tough market place. The system recognises this uniqueness and caters for it by providing you with a customisable platform to fit the way you work.

All QuotationBuilder attributes are configurable. A super-user can add attributes to the quotation header or the quotation line. These attribute can either be manually entered or calculated. The super-user can even add or change the calculation for any existing attribute.

An easily maintainable and synchronised product and customer database

The product database holds information about the products ready for quotations. The product information that can be stored is limitless; it can include dimensional, performance, and price information, or any other numerical values, text values, pictures, datasheets or tables.

Products are under version control to ensure the integrity of historic quotations and to provide historical price analysis.

The product database provides excellent search capabilities to help your sales staff find the right product for their customer quickly. The database also features a side-by-side comparison facility to help identify subtle differences between products.

Synchronizing the product database
An enterprise may have a number of sources from which products will be used to quote a client. Sources like an ERP system, third party catalogues, or simply a spreadsheet. It is essential that these product sources are synchronised with the quotation system to ensure the quotations accuracy and consistency.

The product database has a number of methods to link to multiple external databases for retrieving product information, or can simply by loaded from a spreadsheet. When a change occurs to a product, details of the version of the product are maintained aswell as a historic link between what has previously been quoted to the customer.