Thursday 20 June 2013

MFG Costing to Engineering App

This week I'm covering a new app in the PLM 360 App Store, the MFG Costing to Engineering app. The Costing to Engineering app helps with one of the most important phases of your product design. The costing, quote, order and engineering processes, use the app the track the progress at each stage and make sure that everyone is involved in the approval process.

This app consists of 5 workspaces:



Project Management: This is the top level project, all of the costing, quote, order and engineering process are managed and tracked via dynamic Gantt chart.

Stage 1: Costing Management: To track the initial product costs and review with the internal review team.

Stage 2: Quote Management: To produce the quote and submit to the customer, you can also create a bespoke print view to match your company standards and logo.

Stage 3: Order Management: Once the quote has been approved this will take you through the order entry process.

Stage 4: Engineering Management: This is the last stage and the management of the drawing process will start here.

Lets take a walk through and see how it works....

Costing Management:

1. Complete the description, customer, start date etc 



2. Based on customer spec and requirements, draft drawings and proposals are created and approved using the workflow approval process.







3. Internal costs for the new product based on the customer requests are entered in the costing tab.

4. The specification and costings need to be approved next and once this is complete a new quote management record is created automatically.
Quote Management

1. Now you need to prepare the quote for the customer, all the details have been carried over from the costing management  workspace, the project details, internal costs and also a link to the costing management record for reference. You can restrict view access to the admin section if you choose to.


2. Now you can add details to the quote grid and use the quotation workflow to approve these costs. You can even include the customer so they can approve the quote in PLM 360.



The quote is then approved by sales, project team and the customer 


You even have a print view that you can customise to match your company standards.







3. Once the quote is approved a new order management record is created automatically.


Order Management

1. As per the costing and quote processes, the description, customer and project details are carried over.  The quote value and automatically calculated profit are displayed, these can be used for the order entry process if needed. Again this view can be restricted to certain groups.



2. The order entry workflow process is then carried out and then the last stage, a new engineering management record is created automatically.








Engineering Management

1. As per the costing, quote and order processes, the description, customer and project details are carried over. The last approval process takes place and you can start to produce the component drawings and specs ready for production. You can also include the customer at this stage to make sure you have 100% approval of the design.




Project Management.

For each of the processes above you would have specified a start date. This start date is used to automatically create milestones for each process stage/approval. These can now be rolled up to the projects workspace for progress tracking.



Expanded view



Hope you get some value from this app, remember as with all the apps in the App Store you can edit, add or delete fields and configure the workflows to match you own business processes more closely if needed.

Thanks for reading.....Mike