Sales

CRM

Customer Relationship Management is an essential tool for raising the bar when it comes to building a relationship of trust and loyalty with your customers. Nowadays, it is important not only to maintain but also to improve the quality of services, thus improving customer relationships.

Utilizing the full potential of the CRM tool, allows you to effectively adapt your sales strategy and offering, improve your customer relations and increase your sales volumes, the level, and sourcing of your revenue.

Managing Customer Information

The information managed in the CRM tool allows for your sales department to maintain and improve customer relationships. All prospective customers can be added to the CRM system to subsequently prepare a quotation fit to their needs. Once the quotation is converted to job order, a prospect is automatically converted to a customer. This way, you can track all history of activities of your customers and prospect conversion statistics for further evaluation. In addition, you can track your customers from the very first quotation request until product delivery.

Furthermore, you can record and monitor the organizational and billing details for your customers, add customer preferences related to production and product deliveries. This assures that you will not count on your employees to remember for example how each customer order needs to be batched or packed.

Another important piece of information that can be added to the customer’s data is their evaluation criteria for retention. If a customer lends weight to complete rather than partial deliveries, noting this information before you start planning their order is of the essence. Thus, you can continuously assess your internal sales processes and follow up the entire sales cycle, in virtue of customer satisfaction.

The importance of extended data management is that it enables your sales teams to extract important information and lists of customers, i.e., with specific preference criteria, which can be used to create CRM marketing campaigns as needed.

Built for functionality

Through the information captured by the CRM tools in combination with the information captured by the other modules of Overprint MIS, you can create and maintain reports and dashboards (including parameters such as time periods, production times, product type, order quantities, etc.), through which you will be able to enhance decision-making and optimization of your production, improving efficiency and quality of delivered products and services.

The sales team can organize their tasks and daily schedule within the integrated task calendar according to business priorities. In addition, you can manage your sales team resources, assign tasks i.e., preparing a quote, organizing a customer meeting, sending samples, adding recurring events, marking important deadlines, etc.

Extensive data can be added, as per users’ preference, which provides smart functionality options. For example, depicting the location of customers’ different sites on a map, functionality which proves to be very effective in cases where a customer order is placed centrally and requires orders to be partially delivered to local branches spread in diverse locations where the organization is active. Depicting these branches on a map, amplifies the logistics process and optimizes the organization of deliveries.

Cost Estimation

Specific to your business

Cost estimating products that are produced using a different print application are diversified, therefore different cost estimating processes need to take place. The different processes are logged by the user on the same Cost Estimation tool, according to the selection of the product type by the user. This provides the advantage that the user can utilize the same environment on all print applications, while at the same time each cost estimation works specifically for the business.

Core of the MIS system

Cost Estimation is the core of the MIS system, which gathers information from multiple sources within the system, namely Master Data, Job Specs, the Warehouse module, and Equipment. Through this, a detailed job analysis document is assembled combining multiple parameters and cost centers such as materials, imposition, production, manual labor processes, customer-specific price lists, etc.

Costing can be set up in different ways, either to facilitate time-based industrial cost estimation or activity-based cost estimation. Multiple price lists are possible on each occasion, in which every piece of equipment may hold a different cost price per hour, each product may hold a different price per ordered quantity or supplier, etc.

How detailed cost analysis works

The system will estimate the cost of materials and services as well as the set-up /production times needed to produce every product that needs to be quoted as per the customer’s request. All standard and variable costs are considered and calculated based on the job criteria. In addition, further information will be calculated such as the estimated waste material, the availability of resources in equipment and operators.

The Detailed Cost Analysis is by default made in different multitudes of quantities, since specifically a label product may be quoted differently when quantities vary i.e. for 100.000, 500.000, or 2.000.000 pieces. The Cost Estimation provides a comparison table for each Product, depicting the Detailed Cost Analysis in different quantities, and what’s more, it also provides a Production Proposal that will provide the calculation of the optimum and cost-effective production method. This feature is highly appreciated when both conventional and digital printing can be used to produce a label.

Reviewing your Actual Production Costs

Having estimated, quoted, and produced a job order, it remains to confirm the estimated costs by calculating the actual costs incurred. This is easily made possible through different channels within Overprint MIS. Actual production costs can be reviewed separately per job ticket or in an overall production report under the Business Intelligence & Reporting module.

On each job ticket, after the end of production, the users can access the Production Cost Analysis report. This provides a detailed cost analysis of estimated and actual production costs, allowing the comparison in a table view or bar charts. This view provides separately the services costs, material costs, labor, outsourcing, and equipment costs each one in detail for each task it includes. In addition, the user can review the quantities used at the consumption of materials and the duration of each task.

Machine Learning in Cost Estimation

When a Job Order is created, the Job Ticket containing all the specifications for producing a Product is feeding the Machine Learning engine. The ML engine is in turn calculating all the historical data for each specification, material, and equipment used, and provides a forecast for the set-up and production times, the amount of waste material, etc. This is feeding the Cost Estimation engine making the cost estimation process much more accurate than what it would have been calculated by just theoretical forecasting. The most complex theoretical forecasting will never be as accurate as the forecasting based on historical data.

Quotations

Having gathered the complete information in the job analysis document, the system will produce a Detailed Cost Analysis and a Customer Quotation.

While the final product is described, the cost is calculated, and having the desired margin logged, the sales price is also calculated to feed the quotation. The margins per item group can either be set at the customer data, or they can be added to each calculated item. This means you can enter separate margin percentages for the calculated cost of set-up times, substrates, inks, third-party services, etc.

A Customer Quotation is generated according to a standard company template, which is set up once at the beginning of the system configuration and used every time a quotation is sent to a customer. This provides fast output of the quote, uniform brand, and company image across the entire customer portfolio and includes the standard company terms & conditions applying to all customers.

Revisions of different quotations are maintained in the system. Approval workflows can be set up internally as well as workflows for sending the quotation to the customer.

Orders

Orders are automatically converted starting from the product specification using the same data set that was used to create the Customer Quotation. In addition to the product specs, the order contains the quantities, pricing, delivery details, and the calculation of the time and material that is required to produce the job in each production phase from printing to finishing and packaging. Orders can be displayed in a grid view enabling filters that are selected on user preference criteria. The user can drill down to retrieve all needed order details including the steps on each defined production process.

Managing Multiple Orders

An order can be assigned as part of a project, which is a bigger set of product orders that the customer has placed. A separate project management section is designed similar to the orders management section. Multiple orders can be created provided these are sourced from the same customer and that there is a project assigned to them.

Optimize the Sales Process

The CRM and the Order comprise a series of steps the sales team follows from an early-stage lead to a closed customer. Sales representatives can follow up on their customer orders, creating custom-made views based on filtering criteria upon their preference.

Orders are processed, delivered, and invoiced via separate screens which are designed according to the specific requirements for each function. Several validations are by default enabled within the order workflow, to ensure data integrity throughout the process. For example, an order cannot be edited in case its status is “in progress”.

When a sales order is registered and the products are added to the order, the system will automatically create reservations of these materials, including the raw materials required for completing the order. Material reservations will easily provide info when compared to the expected quantity, on production or out of production, how much quantity is still required to be produced or purchased.

Standard views display the pending deliveries, deliveries history, packing lists, and pending sales order deliveries to allow for optimizing the sales order management.

Ordering workflow

The order processing workflow includes validations, which require specific requirements to be met to further process an order, and approvals, which are defined on specific functions in combination with user permissions. For example, the finance department may need to approve an order before this is assigned to production planning- in case of customer overdue.

Notifications can be set, which will inform the users when an order is set on a specific status to allow timely follow-up of the orders. Numerous notifications may be defined in different steps of the order workflow – for example, thank you emails can be sent to customers with job portal login instructions when the order is assigned to production planning, or when an order status changes to “ready for shipment” an email may inform the customers about the order status.