Engineering CRM
In an engineering office the most expensive resource is the engineer's hour, and a significant part of that hour goes into quotes that are never won. When it is not measured how many quotes a customer asks for and how many of them turn into orders, the office keeps spending effort on the work it already spends the most effort on.
The task time written against quote preparation accumulates on the opportunity record; reported together with the quote's outcome field, the hour cost of lost quotes comes out separately.
- Accumulate the engineer hours spent on quote preparation on the opportunity record and measure how many orders each customer gives against how many quotes
- Keep the compliance answers given to specification clauses and the assumptions on the quote record and compare them between revisions
- Follow the hours spent on a fixed-price project side by side with the contract budget and set a warning for projects nearing a budget overrun
- Keep warranty end and maintenance contract renewal dates on the project record and gather those that are due in a list
| Quote File | Every request for a quote is an opportunity record; the specification attachment, the assumptions and the compliance answers sit on the same card, and the revisions are lined up in the record history. |
|---|---|
| Man-Hour Record | The time spent is written against the task; because tasks are tied to the opportunity and to the project, the quote cost and the project cost are added up from the same place. |
| Win Rate | The outcome of the quote is a field on the opportunity record; how many quotes were given per customer and how many of them were won is reported from that field. |
| Maintenance Contract Renewal | The warranty and contract end date is a field on the project record; those whose date is approaching fall into a list and are opened as a new opportunity. |
An engineering quote does not come off a price list: the specification is read, a survey is made, the calculation is built and more than one engineer spends hours on the same file. Because these hours are not written down anywhere, when the quote is lost its cost becomes invisible too; the quotes that won the work and the quotes that only ate time sit in the same list at the end of the period.
Because Rapitek CRM opens the quote file as a record too, the task time spent accumulates on the opportunity and the win rate is read per customer. When the project is won the same record continues, so hours spent on a fixed-price job exceeding the contract budget becomes visible while the overrun is happening, not after the work is finished. Because the end date of the warranty and the maintenance contract also sits on the same record, the renewal meeting comes onto the agenda by itself.
The scope of the plans and the separately priced items are written on the pricing page.
