Booth #318

BTO and ETO manufacturers quote product(s) that are comprised of both released and “yet to be designed” parts. Traditional ERP solutions lack the ability to adequately treat unreleased parts through such process disciplines as engineering, estimating, tooling and manufacturing phases. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a class of software that is uniquely qualified to support these pre-release processes but has typically not been pushed to support the quoting cycle. This session shows how companies are benefiting by leveraging PLM to field quotes, treat unreleased parts, collect the needed quoting information and even develop “proforma P&L” to track the quoted profit margin.

The topics covered will show how the quoting process can be automated to:

• to respond to the nature of an order type, customer, and product and/or services
• assign tasks that are relevant to only those that need to be involved
• leverage the existing released database of parts and assemblies (optimize reuse)
• establish place-holder parts and/or assemblies
• monitor profit margin based on parameter adjustments
• track and manage the quoting history

This session seeks to break the traditional view that PLM is only useful for engineer. PLM is a process oriented environment that ultimately manages parts, related data and their change and configuration. The paradigm shift is to consider the quoting process as part of the product development process and embrace the capabilities of PLM to ultimately reduce risk and achieved the quoted profit margins.