There is good news for production companies that manufacture customized configured products in small quantities. Tailwater Digital offers a bi-directional interface for its quote and order management solution DashQ to our production scheduling software just plan it. Velosity and just-plan-it together provide a full management solution from sales through production and combine the advantages of both systems – accurate and fast quoting, easy order acceptance, and simple and efficient production scheduling.
Velosity from the US company Tailwater Digital shines where ERP systems at built-to-order companies are a poor fit: determining a reliable production cost with minimal effort. Products with very complex customer-selectable features and manufacturing steps is the bread and butter for make-to-order companies. ERP systems fail at this point because configured products do not have defined (reusable) part numbers that can be added to a quote. Each line item must be created from scratch for every quote.
Quotation in this industry segment means creating a new BOM (Bill of Material) and new routings for each quote line item, requiring significant time investment by Sales – delaying responsiveness to customers. The time intensiveness is driven by the need to “get the cost to build” correct. At the same time, the conversion rate from quotation to customer order is low, which means a large fraction of the Sales effort is lost. Ted Christiansen, CEO of Tailwater Digital, explains the dilemma:
"For every ten quotes prepared and submitted, only 1-3 become sales orders."
To combat this waste of time and energy, Velosity eliminates the manual creation of router and BOM enabling custom quotation very quickly and easily. Because the production costs and routing are precisely known at quoting, neither must be updated in downstream processes. In addition, it only takes a few clicks to convert the quote into a sales order and then into a production order when the order is placed.
<<10x+ Times Faster Quote Generation>>
just plan it and Velosity share the same focus on the market of high-mix low-volume production companies. The development of the interface to just plan it is an important step to offer a suitable solution from quotation to production, to help these small companies grow. Ted sums it up:
"The combination of these two solutions is extremely powerful for make-to-order manufacturers. Integration with just plan it enables bi-directional synchronization of production orders between Velosity and just plan it. Users can view or modify the production schedule from within just plan it and mark tasks as completed.
Dave Luckner, scheduling specialist from just plan it, adds:
"It creates new transparency between sales and production, improves communication, and problem areas can be identified, discussed and solved early."
This blog post has been updated on Nov 31, 2023, due to the rebranding of DashQ to Velosity.