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 Quote

• Create Order
  Creates a new order based on the information of the current Quote.
  See https://3yourmind.atlassian.net/l/c/zhuRQn60

• Edit 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 https://3yourmind.atlassian.net/l/c/kw2rRRbx.

• 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.

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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.

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.

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The rejection reason is visible on both User Panel and Service Panel

On each of the Sales Transaction tables rejected transactions are hidden by default. They can be shown by enabling the “Include rejected requests” filter.

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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.