Tuesday, March 8, 2011

ERP Functions: Marketing 1

In the last post we understood that ERP is a management tool which aids to manage the firm professionally by achieving business standard in all the functions of the organization.

There are common business functions by which an organization is run. Here is the link on brief about each one of them and flow of functionality. In this blog I will try to explain functionality of each of them.

All the business are driven by Sales of the company. Its the point where revenue is generated. So how does Sales Department function?

For any sale to happen a customer is required. With the high competition in the current Global environment just producing best products or providing best services will not always grows the sales of the company. So there is sub function called Marketing which does the work of reaching the potential buyer and converting them as customer or client.

There is a procedure of Marketing which will be explained here. Briefly it starts with Campaign, through this Leads are identified. Then Leads are followed up to get the deal/Enquiry. Now I will be explaining the flow of information and decisions in the marketing department.

Potential Customer may either search for a supplier for a requirement of him or Marketing team may get through such customers. Then the first document received from customer is Enquiry. Some of the organizations also calls it as RFQ (Request for Quotation) This document usually contains product specifications, drawings and other details about the product. Along with these it also contains delivery requirement of the customer. Customer will also specify terms and conditions on payment, delivery etc. Overall this document will provide detail information on the needs of the customer.

After receiving of Enquiry from a customer a Feasibility Study is done within the organization.  Design & Engineering, Quality, Production,Purchase, Marketing, Finance departments are have to play the key role in the study. Design & Engineering department will provide the raw material specification, a projection of production flow with machine and man power requirements. This is done with coordination of Production and Quality departments. Purchase department will provide the estimated price of the raw material and any other consumable and machinaries required for the production. Along with this Purchase department also ensures the avaialbility of materials and machinaries (if any) for production to achieve the delivery of products as per customer required date.  Marketing department will collect all these data. Then finally Finance department estimates the cost of raw material, cost of the production, cost of transportation and other miscellaneous costs. This estimation of cost is very much essential. Then additional profit margin is added and price of the product is decided. This price is the deciding factor of getting profit to the company. If any component of cost is missed or miss calculated then company may produce and sell high number of products but profit will not be increased.Then the terms and conditions of customer is reviewed by Marketing, Sales, Finance department. With these information Marketing department starts preparing quotation to send to customer.

I will explain the components of Quotation and further flow of information in next blog. Keep watching...

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