Hello,
I wanted to share some items that I am running into
that maybe someone else has solved or perhaps facing a similar problem. I
am looking for ideas, suggestions or even product improvements that could go
into Method to enhance the solution.
First, it is important to understand we are a
manufacturer, distributer and drop shipper, some products we ship or deliver,
some we drop ship and some rather than drop shipping are shipped to us for
further modification, we also have customer pickups. One order can have all the
scenarios listed above and on average about 1/3 or our orders fall into this
situation the rest are single shipments with one to many items.
Method
has allowed us many improvements, but we are now faced once again with
challenges that need to be further refined to save time. My hope in writing this is that this thread
can be mutually beneficial to many – Method and its customers and my company. That is why I have explained our processes,
pain points and what I think would be the right solution.
Warehouse and Shipping Management Process
To tackle the management of our order process I have
modified the "Existing Cases Window" to become our "Warehouse
and Shipping Manager" and this tracks an order from initial sale to
delivery by invoice number/customer with an internal workflow status we use and
various other key data points such as shipping origin, our line of business,
shipping carrier and tracking number.
Pain Point
While
the process of what I have done with Method is a vast improvement over previous
business processes, it is still a time consuming manual process.
What would be nice:
1. An auto populated record in our
"Warehouse and Shipping Manager" upon payment of invoice.
What would make this tricky is that one invoice can have multiple rows in
the "Warehouse and Shipping Manager" because we have two
physical shop locations on opposite ends of town and several Drop Ship vendors. Each item must be tracked independently on a
given order if the Ship From location is different.
2. An update to the Invoice field "Other" in
QB, we use this as the "Fulfillment/Ship Date" from the "Fulfillment
Date" field in the in the "Warehouse and Shipping Manager"
row which is entered when the order is shipped.
3. Email capability at the row level
in "Warehouse and Shipping Manager", since each invoice could
have multiple separate shipments to notify the customer their product has
shipped and provide the tracking number(s). Ideally you could check which
items for that invoice you wanted to email the customer on.
Sales Process
Today 90% of our orders are generated
from our websites and we have 5 main product lines and within each product line
hundreds to thousands of SKUs, many of our products are configuration or
customizable which is labor intensive in and of itself. We do our quoting and
proposals typically in Word and then PDF, this will likely not change because there
are technical details that must be communicated in the proposal as well as
pictures. We have an eCommerce site that
is integrated into QB as well but the bulk of our orders come through the phone
where a salesman works with the customer to provide pricing, product fit,
description, answer questions and provide a personal level of service. However since we do most of our business on
the phone, as you can imagine the sales process can take a while especially for
our higher end large products which can reach $80,000 or more and the sales
cycle may take weeks with multiple calls.
For our smaller and lower priced products the sales process may take 10 –
20 minutes on the phone and before we can finalize the sale we must get all the
standard bill to/ship to information and credit card info. A very high percentage of our sales do close
because we are in a niche market so we are not doing a lot of quoting for the
smaller sales. All salesmen are
commissioned so they are incented to close the sale and help the next customer.
Pain Points
Because we are accustomed to writing
invoices vs. quotes/sales orders the salesman often feel they have wasted time
when they start an invoice for it to really turn into a quote. They don’t like using the quotes because they
feel like it is just additional unnecessary steps when most calls end in a
closed sale except for the high end products.
We frequently get system errors on the
receive payment screen, this adds to frustration when trying to close that sale
so they can move to the next call and increases the time investment to finish
that sale.
We frequently run special sales
pricing and there is no way for the salesman to use price levels to discount
the sale. This interrupts the process
where they have to wait for me to go into QB and apply the discounts on the
invoice for them so they can process the credit card payment.
Generating the multitude of purchase
orders that are required and emailing those out.
What would be nice:
1. The ability to generate Purchase Orders from
invoices without having to key in the PO and without having to create a Sales
Order first, I myself can find no value in having the Salesman create sales
orders, but I could be wrong here. A
screen with all new invoices that have not had purchase orders generated would
be ideal here so the additional capability to tie an invoice to a PO would be
required as well.
2. A native way to use price levels to apply
discounts, this is a severely limiting feature and my understanding it is a QB
limitation not Method and if that is true what influence can be leveraged to make
this message heard loudly by QB? I am
really not interested in paying for a customization here.
3. Not sure how you could help on this one but we
have a large number of Apple users that cannot view the Invoice PDF when we
send the invoice to the customer. Could
an image file be generated instead?
4. What are your thoughts about a streamlined “Invoice
screen” controlled by a radio button group that would allow either a Quote,
Sales Order or Invoice to be created.
The thought here is that it is one screen rather than the current 3
screens which adds to training efforts and end user confusion and
dissatisfaction. The entry of the
customer information could also be streamlined to capture all the pertinent
information up front that will be required to ship a product (minus credit
card) and if this turns into a quote or prospect then it could simply be a
lead. Again the concept would be one
streamlined screen.
CRM and Email Process
We are extensive email users and do
receive questions, requests for quotes, etc. via email. Currently the salesman use desktop email clients
outside of Method.
Pain Point
In this area I have to give Method a
D-, prior to Method I used SugarCRM and their CRM and Email applications were
spot on, intuitive and useful. I have
not found this to be the same with Method, it is confusing, hard to use and I
am not sure it works. Therefore we don’t
use any of these features in Method, but would really like to. We frequently send multiple attachments to
emails which could include product information, pictures, etc. Customers also send us signed specification
documents, pictures, etc.
What would be nice:
1. Some case studies showing how this is being
used effectively without the need for an email client.
2. A training offering based on how I would
envision my company using CRM. We are
not doing anything unusual; again the issue is that it is not intuitive.
Thank you and look forward to hearing
some feedback and ideas.
Rob Griffin