Inventory, Product Catalog
Ability to create and manage an inventory of products by clients.
Rather than create this ourselves at the moment, our Professional Services team is able to integrate Maximizer with your inventory management ERP.
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Simon Pickard commented
Hi guys, Can you share some of these integrations - especially to Accounting systems such as Sage Europe, SAP and any Infor ERP systems
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Jin Yu commented
Product catalog feature related to the quotation solution has been scheduled for Maximizer CRM 2018 release. In the short term, we are exploring using Excel 365 to support simple quotation. Product line items will be built into Excel file.
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Michael Melvang commented
I like the idea of linking the OrderDesk to opportunity, because it allows user to use the Opportunity tab more as a Project tab and thereby create an overview of the products involved in a sales opportunity.
Another piece missing would be a link between Opportunity and Service Case to make the sales project follow up more complete.
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Mike Caliguri commented
There is another request for a similar idea named "Asset Management"
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David Asher - Avrion commented
In line with what Bruce has mentioned already. I think the line items / products have to be added to an Opportunity as this will be at the Quoting stage of a sale (the line items could well come from a product catalog).
For most of out customers I think this would suffice for now.
Taking it further though, some form of 'promote opportunity to order' button could then take these items, quantities, prices etc and create an OrderDesk 'order', thus giving us the sales and order history of an address book entry.
As far as improving the Orderdesk - obviously visually it has not been changed for some years.
Based on its history it was linked into ecommerce modules for selling 'widgets' so there was always a lot of fields that were redundant to those who were selling services or solutions.
We always found the whole shipping and tax element too much for what we needed, I guess this is relevant for the USA market though.
Taking a leaf from other CRM solutions then simply had product \ solution name, quantity, price, discount, sub and grand totals - then the ability to promote these items into a quote template.
I hope that gives you some ideas from my own personal experiences. -
To address this request, what would everyone think of the idea of improving OrderDesk and linking it with Opportunities? If so, what else would you like to improve in OrderDesk?
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Bruce commented
Practically, Product/Service and Categories values need to be generated from the Order desk catalogue. When selected in an opportunity have a tick box to “generate quote” whereby a wizard takes you through selecting the quantities, discount or profit margin for each categories selected save it as a document to be emailed to an opportunity contact.
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David Asher - Avrion commented
That is the point Bruce, you should not have to create 4 * 20 UDF's for a feature that ideally should be standard in the product as it is any other CRM solution out there.
What if a customer wanted 21 products then everything you have written would have to be modified, that is where it gets messy. -
Bruce commented
We have created Opportunity Udfs i.e Item 1 Product code, Item 1 Description, Item 1 Quantity and Item total same for Item 2 ...20 and added them to Opportunity key fields so they display correctly. We have investigated looking at a sql script that would pull the SKU and Description from the Order desk Product Catalogue and to populate the tables price and description if Product code is selected off the table. (we have not proceeded with this as yet) We currently use a Crystal report to then format the quote proposal with the udfs and combine an Opportunity Note with Category "Quote Note" as Cover page details . Price totals are added up and again we have a SQL script that updates the opportunity revenue with the quote total.
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Jenny Carey commented
I completely agree with the comments below. Several of our customers have asked if they can use Maximizer to prepare quotes from a centrally managed price catalogue, and the solution has always had to involve 3rd party software such as Synergy or Magnet. It's about time Maximizer updated the old OrderDesk module and made it a lot more customisable.
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Tim Cappetto commented
I would like to see this as well. I do not like having to create the same company more than once company1, company2, etc just so that I can separate the products that they have. It is not intuitive and creates a lot more work. I too see the value of having a one to many relationship on products to company or individual in allowing our sales team to make quotes straight from Maximizer CRM Live.
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David Asher - Avrion commented
Joseph,
We have many customers who sell products, solutions, services and although the Product/Services and Categories fields are great in giving a simple overview of what areas an Opportunity maybe related to, a lot of systems in sales environment would like to see an Opportunity store the exact product name, a quantity and also a value as line items, either keyed in manually or even better if from some form of product catalog.
UDF's are by no means a work around for this as they would be too cumbersome to construct and with the varying quantities required on each occasion it makes this tricky to implement properly and use.
It simply keeps everything regarding the sale together in one place as other ways of implementing do not really provide a seamless solution:
As a workaround we have got users to attach a document with the details, but other CRM systems are capable of taking these line items and then merging them into a Word document, hence creating a quote document saving the user a fair amount of time in not having to do this on each occasion. Ask any sales person how much time they spend creating quotes, the more this is populated automatically the better.
The only other viable alternative is to use a third party quoting software such as QuoteWerks but its integration is very limited with Maximizer as it only links to the Address Book modules. This solution would also not function in a browser environment.
I hope that gives you more of an idea as to where it would be nice to take the Maximizer solution next.
With the possible phasing out of the Sage Act! solution, this is an area that Maximizer lacks in functionality over this product, so another potential 'tick in the box' for those users who may consider moving to Maximizer rather than the bigger high value Sage solutions such as CRM and SalesLogix. -
Joseph Hui commented
We would like to collect more feedback on how the Product Catalog will be used in the real world. If you have some real world use case scenario you can share with us, it will be greatly appreciated.
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Brendan commented
Completely aggree! Has this been addressed in the update?
Thanks -
This also includes another related idea:
Product Line Items in Opportunities
Most CRM solutions that are available offer when adding an Opportunity the ability to create a group of product line items, quantity, price etc and in turn create a quote or total the value of the Opportunity. Maximizer has the OrderDesk but there is no connectivity to Opportunities and the module is starting to show its age. User defined fields as a workaround is not really a viable solution to this.