Processing Orders, Quotes and Requests as Sales Transactions
Overview
Sales Transactions are designed to help AM service providers and competency centers quickly process Requests, Quotes, and Orders in separate workflows. This helps to allocate responsibility between team members and track a part in different sections of the software for each stage. That makes a much smoother process for an order from initial negotiation to approval for production. All communication gets stored in a single location at each stage of the workflow and is easily accessible at a later stage.
Stages of a Sales Transaction
Request Stage
The Request Workflow covers the cases in which the buyer is not sure how to proceed with placing an order. For instance, they may want a recommendation for a material or post-processing method. Another use case is when some or all 3D files need to be manually priced.
In each case, the “partially completed order” is sent as a Request to the Printing Service. The engineer or business developer can answer any open questions using the platform communication and properly price the models. The saved result will become one or more Quotes that are saved in the system.
Main actions available:
Create Quote
Turns a request into a quote by adding the missing information. See Creating and Editing Quotes as a Service | Creating a Quote from a Request
Quote Stage
The Quote Workflow is the main communication tool for negotiating and confirming an order with customers during the sales stage.
After a user has uploaded their models, configured their settings, and selected a price based on materials and post-processing, they will have the option to save it as a quote to place an order later.
This is most often used to compare various options, to get approval from a manager or team member before purchasing, or to confirm the production while waiting for a final design update. The quote can be downloaded as a PDF to share for approval outside of the platform.
Main actions available:
Create PDF
Creates a Quote PDF that can be downloaded. In case the shipping and billing information has not been provided, yet, it must be added first. To do so, edit the quote and save a new version including the customer’s shipping and billing information.Edit Quote
Edits the current Quote.
See Creating and Editing Quotes as a Service | Editing a QuoteCreate Order
Creates a new order based on the information of the current Quote.
See Creating and Editing Orders as a Service - Platform Documentation - ConfluenceEdit Expiration Date
Changes the expiration date of the current Quote. This also allows making an already expired Quote valid again. To do so, simply set the expiration date to a future date.
Order Stage
Orders are confirmed production requests which come from buyers who have accepted the price and the terms and conditions. An order can be directly placed from the basket or from a quote that is approved by the buyer.
Once placed, the order will appear for the selected printing service in the Service Panel with the parts classified for production by material and post-processing method. The order view provides a simple method to filter orders and track the status of orders as they are completed.
Main actions available:
Change Order Status / Set Status
Changes to order status of the current Order.
On how to define custom order statuses, see Custom Order Statuses - Platform Documentation - Confluence.Edit Order
Edits the current Order.
See Creating and Editing Orders as a Service | Editing an Order
Moving an Order to Production
When a new order is placed, it is in the initial order status configured for each Service, e.g. Pending
. By changing the order status to
If using the Agile MES, all ordered parts will also appear in the part view to schedule for production.
Rejecting Requests, Quotes and Orders
Services can formally reject requests or quotes that cannot be fulfilled and provide a reason for rejection, which is stored along with the rejected request or quote.
An email to inform the customer about the rejection can be sent automatically, too. The email subject and body are pre-filled with a template.
From version 23.6 onwards:
A standard template is already provided in English. Services can adjust the template and/or add translations for other supported languages if desired. The templates can be added and edited in the admin panel:
Home › Partner › Fulfillment partners › <YOUR SERVICE> › [Request|Quote|Order] rejection email template
See also Adding new Printing Services | Rejection email templates
With this new functionality, we’re also unifying and extending it to orders. Instead of setting an order to "Cancelled," we now mark them as "Rejected". Similar to requests and quotes, a rejected order now carries the status "Rejected" and allows for a rejection reason to be stored.
On each of the Sales Transaction tables rejected transactions are hidden by default. They can be shown by enabling the “Include rejected requests” filter.
Sales Transaction Naming Structure
The Full Number of Sales Transactions (Requests, Quotes, Orders) follows a consistent naming convention that makes it easy to identify related transactions across the business workflow.
Project Number: Automatically assigned by the software, remains the same across related Sales Transactions
Title: Editable by the user, can be changed individually for each Sales Transaction. Spaces will become dashes.
O1: Stage Type + Sequence Number
O → Order
Q → Quote
R → Request
Full Number: Project Number - Title - Stage + Sequence Number
Example of a Quote number:
124514 - My-Project - Q3