Quote to Order: The Revolution Your Customers Want in Quote to Order Workflows By Louis Columbus, Cincom Manufacturing Business Systems

Making manufacturing an essential part of any customer-facing process including defining customized products that are purposely built for a specific task, visibility into the status and completion of orders, setting and keeping production and delivery commitment dates, are all part of the revolution your customers want.

There is however, for many manufacturers, a paradox: the closer processes bring customers to manufacturing, the more engineers and time required to make these many processes work.

The intent of this white paper is to explain how manufacturers can align more closely with customers, give them the revolution they want, and free up engineering to do what they do best: design, develop, and produce the next generation of products.

The second article, titled Getting Results With Quote-to-Order Strategies, describes how lessons from the last recession and overreliance on technologies versus processes have served up a much-needed wake-up call to the approaches to sourcing, producing, and servicing products.

There's a strong undercurrent of change reverberating through all businesses today. What's happening is that the lessons from the last recession and overreliance on technologies versus processes have served up a much-needed wake-up call to the approaches to sourcing, producing and servicing products. The message is clear that core business processes must be at the center of go-to-market strategies and the direction companies take in managing their growth going forward. It's clear that for any company to attain its revenue objectives, it must pay attention to these process areas. This is especially true in the areas of procurement and strategic sourcing. What's happened is nothing short of a revolution that's being driven by manufacturers who demand that technology contribute to stronger financial performance and growth.

The third article, titled Best Practices In Quote-To-Order: Measuring Quoting Strategies' Financial Impact, describes how getting results from quote-to-order, order-to-cash, sales and product-configuration strategies has to start with defining financial measures of performance before changing these processes ever begins.

Manufacturing companies are capable of much greater financial gains than they are getting today from their quote-to-order, order-to-cash, sales and product-configuration strategies. These process areas center on how manufacturers create, set and keep expectations in their quotes for custom-configured products.

Globally companies are adopting quote-to-order to streamline how they sell customized products. Reasons for pursuing these strategies include increasing factory use, developing related products to extend a product series' life, and often to up-sell and cross-sell their existing customer bases with products tailored to their specific needs. Examples of how quote-to-order, order-to-cash, sales and product configuration impact manufacturing, sourcing and product-management strategies abound throughout the spectrum of complex manufacturing companies globally pursuing these strategies.

Getting results from these strategies has to start with defining financial measures of performance before changing these processes ever begins. Too often companies aren't measuring the financial impact of these strategies – and leaving much of the cost savings and incremental revenue unattained – because extra steps on these strategies are not taken. These strategies have to start with a series of financial metrics if they are ever going to accurately reflect the cost savings and revenue contributions they contribute.