CRM
when an opportunity is approached to the sales team it passes through different pre-defined stages .The sales person is responsible for moving each opportunity to its corresponding stage.
example of CRM stages
when the opportunity reaches the stage request of priced proposal, the estimator is gonna be assigned as a follower on the opportunity. This opens the case for the estimation team to pursue their work by displaying a new smart button which redirects the user to the estimation form.
Job Estimation
The estimator will start filling the estimation form and assigning it to a cost center. The user will list all materials under a specific section titled "Cost Estimation".
This section is purely dedicated to estimators in order to identify the cost for each item reserved for a specific project. After finalizing this part the estimator will include the requested materials inside a dedicated section titled "BOQ" which are going to be reflected later on the quotation created.
The purpose of separating these two sections is to help the estimation team have a restricted preview of materials cost which isn't visible to the sales team
The Estimation form includes also" Labor Estimation" and "Overhead estimation"
The Management will be able to track the tasks assigned to each estimator and how much time spent .This is accessible through a smart button on the estimation form.
Below is the list of tasks related to a job estimation
The user is able to add as many stages as possible and track their progress. Inside each task is some basic information in addition to the timesheets section where the estimator will record his own timesheets.
After estimation is confirmed it will pass through an approval cycle which is determined by the top management followed by a quotation creation in the last step.
The finalized quotation will include all the materials listed in the "BOQ" section previously mentioned, each item will have the cost center associated with it which populates automatically from the job estimation.
Each item mentioned in the sale order lines will have a pre-defined bill of materials of type manufacture. This set of pre-configuration will trigger several manufacturing orders to be executed.
Discount Requests on Sale Orders
sometimes the customer would request a discount on the project in order to tackle , to present a discount approval process dedicated to each sale order .The request is accessible through a button which redirects the user to a new form to submit the customer request.
the user will set the discount either as a percentage or a fixed amount depending on the discount type.
the user will submit the discount request and the managers will approve this request ( based on user restrictions).
managers are also eligible to refuse the request submitted by the user
Upon approval this discount will be directly reflected on the sale order lines
This covers the full scenario encompassing the 3-way relation between the CRM, estimation and sales departments.
Project Estimation