The Challenge

• Client needed a way to do sales quotes for items that had options (like color and size) as well as optional add-ons. A standard method of generating all possible items into unique part numbers was not considered to be a viable solution.
• A pain point was that their ERP solution which supported these item setups was not remotely accessible for sales reps and had a large per user license fee.
• New combinations of options needed to be reviewed by engineering to make sure that the unique configuration was viable and add any extra design time if additional requirements were requested.

The Solution

• Client reached out to us to develop a customization on top of the D365 customer engagement (Dynamics CRM) to handle quoting process. CRM gave them a cloud-based solution for their sales people and a base quoting and sales order process which could be extended for their needs.
• We worked on building out a additional administration elements to set up items with options, which each option getting its own cost and price. We also customized the quote line entry screen to give a friendlier UI for picking options. We added into the quote calculations for total cost per item, margin, more complicated discounting, and some other industry specific needs.
• For the engineering review, we set up a set of workflow to notify engineers of quotes needing to be validated and a sign off process to let the sales people know the quote was ready for the customer. Through some customization we also prevented the quote from being able to be activated until engineering sign off had occurred. This helped prevent a quote from going to the customer accidentally before it was ready.