The order lives in the ERP. The pipeline lives nowhere.
An applications engineer prices a job with the drawing on one screen and a similar quote from two years ago on the other, dug out of a folder named after the customer. That memory is the estimating system. We replace it with one record — the RFQ, every quote revision, the order number the ERP sends back — that the plant can staff, measure and forecast.
Quoting happens in email, and stops being countable.
The quote number is issued in Epicor. The price is built in a spreadsheet on a shared drive. The rep chases status by phone, and the answer depends on who picks up. None of it meets in one record, so the plant cannot state its quote-to-order rate by product line, which agencies sent the work, or how many RFQs it turned down for capacity.
The ERP starts where the selling ends.
Manufacturing — quote to orderWhat the quote desk gets, and what the ERP keeps.
The ERP keeps the order, not the pursuit
Epicor, Infor CloudSuite, SAP or NetSuite keeps the order, the shipment and the invoice. The CRM keeps the opportunity up to order acceptance. Order number, promised ship date and invoiced amount come back one way onto the deal.
Revision nine does not erase revision one
Revision nine of an engineered-to-order quote does not overwrite revision one. Each revision is a dated record with its own scope, price and margin, so a pipeline snapshot taken in March still reads the way it read in March.
Deal registration reps trust
Rep agencies and distributors register an end customer through a portal, with an expiry date, a protected multiplier and a written conflict rule. Approvals are routed, decisions are logged, and the channel sees its own registrations without calling anyone.
Configured products, priced by rule
Option rules, region and channel price books, discount multipliers, and an approval that fires above a threshold. The configuration that produced the number is stored on the quote, so nobody rebuilds it from memory at reorder.
The machine, keyed by serial
Equipment records keyed by serial: model, options as built, commissioning date, warranty end, site. Service tickets, parts quotes and retrofit campaigns attach to the machine, which is how the aftermarket becomes forecastable instead of anecdotal.
Distributor resale, normalised
Monthly point-of-sale files arrive in a different shape from every distributor. They are parsed on a schedule, matched to registrations and end-customer records, and written to one object, so channel revenue reports without a quarter-end spreadsheet.
From the quote desk to the ERP.
Walk the floor
Two weeks inside the quote log, the ERP and the rep list. We count RFQs, follow ten real quotes end to end, and write down where the record stops and a spreadsheet starts.
Draw the print
Objects, fields and stages agreed on paper first: RFQ, quote revision, order, equipment, registration. Owners named, definitions written, and the quote-to-order rate defined once so it means one thing.
First article
The ERP link is built and tested against real order numbers, not sample data. CPQ, the rep portal and the resale feed follow. Failures are logged and alert someone, never silently retried.
Release to production
Documentation, a quote-to-order dashboard the sales manager runs, and a named internal owner trained to add a product line without us. We stay through one quarter close, then step back.
The install base outlives the record.
A serial number is sold to a distributor, installed at a plant, then the plant is sold, the line is relocated, and the machine keeps running for twenty years. Parts orders arrive from sites that were never CRM accounts. Equipment has to be its own object, keyed by serial, with ownership stored as dated events, so service and parts revenue attaches to the machine rather than to whoever first bought it.
