Is there a way similar to sales kits that allow us to bury pricing for several lines into one line for billing purposes. I considered just making a modified report style that would simulate the functionality but still allow the lines to be regular sales detail lines. The reason is simple: we like sales kits but we are make to order for most of our products.
A nice thought:
We started using sales kits a year ago with the knowledge that we can take several lines and bundle them together into one line that we sell to our customer. This gives salespeople the advantage that they can manipulate the individual pricing per component but only display the total of the entire package to our customer. So to our customer they are buying 1 finished “installed piece of equipment” but to us they are buying a base model product, an option, maybe an accessory or two, and installation labor to install it on their truck. So our financial statements reflect the revenue and costs appropriately but our customer gets 1 line item to pay for.
The rub:
But because we are typically make to order, the sales kits often get lost or confused since we can’t tie it to a sales order. Although we have BPMs in place to ensure labor/materials get completed before shipping a product, the stock job prevents us from knowing at the time of shipment which job we’re shipping so we find that there are often transactional errors/timing errors. It’s never from stock. We could overcome those deficiencies with more discipline and training, but the installation labor is a make to order job through and through. So there’s no good way to make sure that the labor for each individual truck gets costed appropriately. It’s always average costing so everything gets smoothed out from a costing standpoint - and that just doesn’t work. So sales kits fight our internal processes and we are looking to stop using them - but we like some of the advantages, which mostly shows up in how we bill our customer and can let sales manipulate them without need for Engineering to update methods of manufacture, etc. It’s like we want a make to order sales kit.
Sometimes, we’ll put the full sales price on the top line, and the accessories and options will be $0 lines below it… For the large projects, we track profit margin by the order, not by the line. Not sure if that’s feasible for you, but it more or less works for us.
I’m curious to see other replies - it’d be nice to have the price roll up to the top line, but still be used for margin analysis. Make an IDEAS and I’ll vote for it for sure. I think there’s enough companies here with similar processes that would appreciate that improvement too.
We are heavily MTO/ETO with the same structure. I have gotten around by using the configurator to add the additional components as MTL items under the top level finished good. I know when we do ETO items we create a “Kit” that does the same thing and ship as needed.
We do something like this with our Configurator as well and I considered the concept. We do have a parent child relationship established for configured orders… but pricing doesn’t flow like that. All lines are priced still in that scenario.
We created a customization in Opportunity Quote, Order Entry & AR Invoice entry. We linked a UD table to the form. This allows the user to create the lines that will print on the Quote Form, Sales Order Acknowledgement, or Invoice.
Then using a UD field at the line level, we enter the line group code. Finally, the modified form if it sees a ne line group will print this and not the documents line. Prices are total on the SSRS form.
Sales Kits can be configured at the time of creating the order.
change your parameters to allow change materials and quantities.
No need for a job or customizations.
Hey Bruce! Hope you’re well. That’s not exactly what I meant. We do customize them per order as needed. But the real issue is that we’re make to order and sales kits requires us to be make to stock. And it’s jazzing everything up by us trying to fight our own processes because we do it different “sometimes”. So I was curious what others do for this type of situation. Essentially, in the absence of a sales kit, how do you make it work like a sales kit? I like Ron’s response. It’s kind of along the same lines as I was already thinking. It’s too bad they don’t make a make-to-order equivalent of a sales kit.
SalesKits are designed to be make to order, not make to stock.
To be clear, the part type is kit, it will have a revision which enables adding a bill of material.
There is no labor component, because the labor is minimal to the process.
A kit would be pull three orings and one oil filter and place in a box. Do that three times to ship out three oil filter kits.
The pricing of the kit can be driven by the selling price of the components.
I follow you. Yeah I misrepresented what it is I’m trying to do. I am trying to use non-stock lines as the sales kit component. We don’t make any of our products to stock. They are always make to order (with rare exceptions). These won’t work in a sales kit.
I am currently working with a company that we are creating a method of manufacturing in the quote.
When the material is added, the est. unit cost is the Part.UnitPrice value vs the PartCost value.
This will guide sales on the final price of the produce.
When the quote is converted to a sales order, the quote method of manufacturing will have all of the details for the make to order job.
