Tender and order management
RFPs, tenders and orders in one pipeline, with committed load visible at the moment a date is promised — since late deliveries usually trace back to a date promised without checking.
What tender and order management covers
RFP and tender compilation
Tenders assembled from reusable components — prior pricing, standard terms, past technical responses — instead of rebuilt from the last similar document each time.
Order pipeline and status
One view from enquiry through quotation to confirmed order, so the likely load is visible before it becomes committed load.
Committed against available capacity
What is already promised set against what can actually be produced, at the moment someone is about to promise more.
Delivery date calculation
Dates derived from the plan rather than estimated, with the assumptions behind a date recorded alongside it.
Handover to production
A confirmed order becoming a production commitment without re-entry, which is where specification detail is most often lost.
Forecasting
Weighted pipeline against capacity, so a resourcing decision can be taken before the orders land rather than after.
Don’t see your challenge here? Talk to us about your project
A date promised without checking the load is the root cause
Almost every late delivery can be traced back to a moment in sales when a date was given based on a general sense of how busy the factory was. Nothing downstream can fully recover from that.
Putting commitments and capacity in one view at the point of promising changes the conversation from optimism to arithmetic. It also makes the cost of accepting a rush order explicit, which is usually the more valuable outcome.
- Capacity at the promise
- Load visible when the date is given.
- Reusable content
- Tenders assembled, not rewritten each time.
- One pipeline
- Enquiry to order in a single view.
- Derived dates
- Calculated from the plan, with assumptions recorded.
- Clean handover
- Order to production without re-entry.
- Weighted forecast
- Likely load visible before it is committed.
Centralised enterprise planning software for an ABB factory
ABB's factory planning software brought tender preparation, order management and production planning into one place, so that a delivery date could be set against actual committed load. Centralising those three is what allows the sales side and the factory to work from the same numbers.
Common questions
Can this work with our CRM?
Yes. The CRM usually keeps the customer relationship and the opportunity; what we add is the link from a quotation to real capacity, which is the part a CRM has no visibility of.
How do you handle rush orders?
By making their cost explicit rather than by refusing them. The system shows what accepting one displaces, so the decision is a commercial judgement taken with the facts rather than an assumption that it will be absorbed.
Is this useful if our order book is mostly repeat business?
Often more so. Repeat business makes reusable tender components and derived delivery dates straightforward, and the discipline of checking capacity before promising pays back on every order rather than occasionally.
Let's talk about your operations
Tell us which spreadsheet is currently holding the plan together and where delivery dates come from today. We will come back with an honest read on the capacity model, the ERP integration involved, and what a realistic first phase looks like.
