Capturing Engineering Quote Time

[bvelestuk (Bruce)]

We do a lot of quotes and they involve a lot of time per quote. Our engineering department wants to have quotes and job (we also do a lot of jobs) show up in the scheduler. The problem is that quotes are not associated with a job and may not ever turn into a job and therefore quotes do not show up in scheduler… We wish to expense time spent on quotes as a period expense, while engineering time spent on job will go into COS. Anyone figure out how to schedule resourses or activities in scheduler without creating a job, or how to clean up the transactions associated witha job easily if we create a job fo rquotes.

[bordway (Bruce Ordway)]

@bvelestuk

schedule resourses or activities in scheduler without creating a job

I’m not aware of anything, would be nice to hear what others have done.

This thread touches on some of the challenges.

Labor before a job is created

we use Indirect Activity, linked to Engineering Resource Group, with a minor customization to capture PartNum, MethodRevison, JobNum(optional), and CheckBox (Flag) to use this record in cost calculation, then we add these costs using these UD fields to the (Make to Stock) Job Cost at the end (i.e. Book to stock Transaction).

If you were only interested in tracking labor hours, I’ve seen some sites set up indirect activity codes for engineering to use for Office MES activities.

[bvelestuk (Bruce)]

Thx - Unfortunately we are also interested in schedule not just costs. The engineering time for quotes can be days worth of labour and we want the labour load to show on the scheduler along with other engineering load. We are thinking of setting up a dummy job. Anyone tried this?

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

@bvelestuk ,

Do you have access to task in the CRM module? While I am not sure there is any way to associate costs with tasks, you could think about creating a task for engineering work on the quote and then you could make a BAQ and calculate the cost based on the time spent on the task. The task has start and end dates.

If you are looking for load numbers based on what has been entered and what still needs to be complete I am sure you could create a similar BAQ…

All of this is pretty manual, but it’s an idea nonetheless.

Respectfully,

Utah

[Mark_Wonsil]

Do you have the Projects module? Each phase comes with a WBS Job that can track labor and materials for you. It’s a more organized way to create the job.

Separately, if it’s always labor, you could create an indirect labor code for each project and charge your labor that way.

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

I thought projects had that ability from what I have overheard. We don’t have that module licensed so I have never been able to play around with it.