Marketing and sales integration
Industrial Equipment Manufacturing (IEM) for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central supports the customer-driven (pull) style of manufacturing.
In the value chain for the customer-driven style of manufacturing, the integration with marketing and sales is one of the key elements to properly process the customer's input.
IEM makes the main marketing and sales entities available in the project:
- Contacts: you can plan and quote projects to contacts in combination with a customer template. When the quote is promoted to an open project, IEM first creates a customer account from the contact, based on the customer template.
- Multiple customers: several customers can be specified for a project, where each project task can have its own customer and ship-to address.
- Interaction Log Entries: you can record all communication with the contact or customer.
- To-Dos: you can plan the activities for your sales staff.
- Combined projects: once the project is open, you can create several projects for a customer and combine the billing in a combined project, similar to combined shipments in sales.
Industrial equipment often requires long sales cycles. To keep track of these cycles, use opportunities combined with the sales cycle workflow to manage your sales funnel. From an opportunity, you can create a sales quote or a project quote. Once the project quote header is created, select a project template to further populate the project with project tasks and an invoicing method. In the project quote, use the project budget lines to calculate the project quote in detail. With project budget versions, IEM supports a quotation process that goes through several iterations: you can create a next version or return to a previous version.
For projects where the sales process is leading and sold items must be supported by installation services, start the process from a sales quote. IEM extends the Make Order action with the option to create a project from a selected template. In this process, the project replaces the sales order. From the project, you create a posted delivery and the sales invoice.
See also
- The value chain and the push/pull point
- Create project visibility
- More visibility, multiple work breakdown structures
- Project and project task status and workflows
- Comprehensive planning
- Flexible manufacturing scenarios
- Warehouse integration for projects
- Resource integration in manufacturing (basic MES)
- Service integration (Servitization)
Welcome to Industrial Equipment Manufacturing