Quoting Process

Sometimes I wonder how many people in the business world truly are in the "same boat" as I am when it comes to certain problems. One major problem that our company has is our quoting process. I do not know if we are like or unlike other companies when it comes to creating a quote for a customer, but outside of the simple line item quote we can quickly put together in Great Plains, I do know we have a disconnected and less than intuitive quoting process.

I do not think our quoting process is that different or even that much more complex than most companies quoting processes, but we just do not seem to have a great method generating quotes. If we need to send a customer a quote on "day to day" order material, Great Plains is fine to generate quotes. However, when it comes to our larger project quotes that require special pricing, package discounting, multiple revisions, and several people being involved in the process, this is when we run into quite a bit of problems.

We basically have two major quoting processes:
1. Irrigation Projects
2. Turf Equipment Projects

Irrigation Projects
The quoting process for irrigation jobs is quite a long process. Sometimes we will work a job for over a year before the final quote is submitted. You could see where keeping track of mulitple revisions for over a year could be tough even if you had a proper quoting process. You also have to factor in inflation over the course of a year. I know it doesn't sound like much, but how many of you out there (raise your hands) hate to see Q1 roll in due to all of the pricing updates you have to make in your systems? That many huh? Another obstacle we run into is who are we actually quoting this project to? Sometimes the contractor installing the job will buy the material, sometime the owner of the job will buy the material, and sometimes they both want a quote (typically displayed in different formats). We also have to deal with special pricing from our vendors. Depending on how deep the special pricing is, will sometimes lead to us selling product below our standard cost in Great Plains (which makes margin calculations all the more important). Currently, we are doing our entire quoting process in Excel. I hope you are starting to see where my concerns are coming from.

Turf Equipment
The turf equipment quoting process is very similar to that of a car dealership. "Do you want leather? How about a navigation system to go with that rear entertainment system and sunroof?". This brings up the idea of a sales configurator software (which are not terribly expensive, but they are not cheap either). I am pretty impressed with the idea of a configurator software and what it could mean in costly mistake savings. We just recently had a large order come through that was quoted by one of our experienced sales guys. Unfortunately, we are still finding items that were left off of the original quote that were required to make the piece of equiipment operate. This guy has been selling the same equipment for over 20 years. If we had a configurator in place, this would not have happened and the configurator would have come close to paying for itself on this one order! The turf equipment quotes will not go through the same (however they will go through some) amount of revisions as an irrigation project, but there are quite a few more turf equipment quotes generated in a year (quite a bit more margin for error as well).

This problem has prompted me to start looking into quoting/configurator applications that can integrate with Dynamics CRM (since that is what the sales guys are used to working in). We will also be able to push CRM generated quotes into Great Plains using our Scribe integration software. I will let you know my findings after I am done evaluating applications.