act/quote, Alma’s quotation module soon available
Alma has designed and developed a quotation module that will meet the requirements of industrial manufacturers and more particularly those of their subcontractors. act/quote, planned to be released in June 2012 with act/cut new version, will fit very basic and complex needs. Users will be able to rapidly generate quotations from the characteristics of parts to be cut and estimate very precisely all the operations required to manufacture a part (cutting, bending, welding, painting, etc.) while including all the required components (fastenings, electronics, etc.) in the price quotation for a part or an assembly.
Industrial manufacturers having specific requirements, act/quote provides flexibility and allows users to create their own operations and customize the related parameters or calculation formulas for a given operation. For example, it will possible to calculate the folding time for a given part according to the number of folds and other parameters such as the fold length.
act/quote will also allow users to customize the quotation templates and reports to be sent to their customers (support of various file types: .pdf, .doc, .html, etc.)
From the user access point of view, act/quote allows to control user rights according to their role in the organization and to determine the tasks a user can perform.
With the basic version of act/quote providing, in particular, all these customization features, our customers will benefit from Alma’s solid skills in the fields of cutting, welding and folding. As a result, machining times are very precisely calculated by taking into account the various constraints of all the technologies our software products support (laser cutting conditions, punching-nibbling tools, multiple welding torches, etc.). Moreover, high added-value and built-in components (nesting and .dxf file import) are available with act/quote to optimize the cost estimate of a part or an assembly.
In addition to this function performing realistic, accurate and optimized quotations, act/quote includes the following benefits:
- safe document management – all data used for a quotation are archived,
- commercial data and parameter adjustment to ensure flexibility – for example, the profit margin rate can be easily modified,
- manufacturing assistance – automatic generation of the manufacturing plan.
The initial version of act/quote to be released will be a stand-alone version. It will be therefore possible to use it without our software act/cut. act/quote will provide import tools to allow synchronizing the customer database or component database with any ERP system.
We hope that act/quote will soon become a useful tool for most of our customers and their subcontractors. Further developments are already planned:
- integration to our CAD/CAM software solutions,
- extremely quick drawing or blueprint scanning functions,
- automatic follow-up of pending quotations,
- statistics generation (amount of quotes resulting in orders).
For all these developments, we will be attentive to our customer needs in order to provide them with the most complete and adequate solution.
