Manufacturing
You make excellent products. But is that enough? If you want to maintain a leading position, optimal coordination with customer requirements is essential – supplying exactly what your customer wants. First and foremost, this places heavy demands on the collaboration between the sales, engineering and production departments. In addition, you face the challenge of delivering custom products using a standard approach. After all, you want to be able to offer predictable quality at affordable prices.
Optimal collaboration
How to coordinate customer requirements, sales knowledge, engineering possibilities and production limitations seamlessly – that is the challenge with which you are confronted if you want to supply customer-specific solutions. Sofon enables your sales representatives and dealers to offer the right products at the right price without having to have all the detailed knowledge themselves. The products they offer will also meet the feasibility requirements of the engineering and production departments.
Respond quickly and correctly
For many companies producing custom quotations is a time-consuming task that has to be carried out primarily by specialists. Furthermore, issuing several versions of quotations increases the risk of errors being made. With Sofon you can coordinate the requirements of your customers and your product options more effectively, you will always be able to respond more quickly than your competitors and every quotation will remain error free. This increases your chances of success and your margins too.
Timely and consistent follow-up
As producing quotations takes up so much time, the task of following them up often gets pushed to one side. Sofon not only frees up time, it also gives you an overview of current quotations and reminds you to follow them up.
Calculation, configuration, visualization and document generation
The way in which quotations are realized and their content differ greatly from one production company to another. For one it is above all a competitively calculated price that is important, while for another what matters is a well-documented quotation document complete with illustrations and options. Calculation, configuration, visualization in 3D and the production of complete documents – including manuals – are tasks that are supported by Sofon.
From sales to production
How quickly can you start production after receiving a signature? Bills of materials and routings are generated even while the quotation is being produced. This means that, at the moment that a quotation becomes an order, production has the correct specifications to hand immediately, either in the form of detailed bills of materials and routings or in the form of functional specifications that can be translated by the engineering department into technical specifications.
After sales service
If you also offer servicing alongside your products, it is often your servicing that determines the loyalty of your customers. Sofon not only enables you to draw up a sales order, but also allows you to generate a service agreement immediately on the basis of the product specifications and desired service level. Following delivery and installation, Sofon supports you when it comes to registering service calls, determining the correct service actions and, if required, recording the materials used as well as the hours worked and costs, which can be used to draw up the service invoice. By managing the installed base of products you have supplied in Sofon you can respond proactively to demand for replacement products.
CRM
For customer-order-driven production companies Sofon provides complete process support from contact to contract. Sofon can therefore be integrated with existing ERP, PDM and CRM systems, but also delivers a complete CRM solution itself, developed specifically for companies that produce customer-specific products.