Establishing a blueprint for world–class customer service

TCM’s Customer Order Processing (COP) handles the creation, maintenance, shipping and invoicing of your customer orders for goods and services. It processes customer orders from entry through inventory allocation, pricing, credit checking, acknowledgment, picking, shipping, invoicing and history. Flexibility is key to the COP’s performance. It efficiently accepts your orders from a variety of inputs and prices items from a wide choice of discount and markup rules. Your operator’s task is kept simple because the process may be customized to the individual’s needs.

COP is designed to enter any combination of stocked, make–to–order, kitted, engineered or configured products on a single order. You can even mix supplying locations on the same order. Since it’s integrated with TCM’s Document Library, you can quickly view drawings, specifications, sales and promotional literature, photographs and catalogs while you are working.

COP Functions

TCM’s Customer Order Processing application provides a robust set of functions designed to provide the world-class service your customers deserve!

The TCM Navigator (shown here) gives you one-click access to the many functions accessible through COP, including order entry and shipping management, invoicing, reports, and Sales History.

Sales Order Maintenance

Here’s an example of a Sales Order Maintenance. Notice that all Sales History is displayed for this customer #10100 during the order entry process.

You can display the detail for any item, such as this example showing invoice #31… or, this example of shipment hm-300.

Additional Features

COP eliminates intermediate-level item number and modular bills by using matrix- tabulated drawing conventions and/or calculated BOM and routings. These values are available at any level of assembly.

Features and Options

COP is also fully integrated with TCM’s Features and Options. These provide a powerful user-defined set of tables describing your product’s unique feature sets or options. For example, you could specify an attribute group such as voltage or horsepower. Then you could further define the features within those groups such as 110 or 220 volt. You may also include options that require prompted variable information rather than a list of choices. This makes your order-entry process more efficient and accurate.

Because COP interfaces with applications including your engineering data, your engineering calculations are used to select other options. This reduces the need for reentry, and reduces errors.

Rule-Based Configurator

You can also be more responsive and efficient when you build customer orders based on your products’ unique characteristics. You can define the necessary rules to make sure only the proper set of compatible options are configured together, eliminating costly, un-buildable product variations.

For your more complex products, you can use the powerful rule-based calculator. It permits complex calculations, logical operations, and the creation of user defined tables to support your engineering calculation requirements. For your highly configured products, you can also use table lookups, text manipulation, and perform complex calculations to automatically prepare unique bill of materials quantities and routing operation runtimes with associated instructions.

You can also use RBC to calculate product prices and costs and to retrieve and view drawings and documents from TCM’s Document Library during the configuration process.

Because RBC is integrated with TCM Supply Chain and MES, your orders, estimates and quotes are entered with a user friendly, interactive question and answer dialogue controlled by the RBC’s configuration rules and calculations. Pricing, costing and material availability information pertaining to the unique configured item is available in real time. When your customer accepts the order, TCM automatically creates one or more shop orders in the TCM MES suite, where the unique bill of materials, routings and instructions information required to process the order is stored. Subsequent orders for the same item can be reentered without going through all the configuration dialogue when you use “preconfigured” item numbers or if you select items from sales history.

After the product is built using the TCM MES suite, the unique bill of materials and routings produced by the RBC, along with any last minute changes or substitutions, can be saved using TCM’s As-Built History. This allows you to permanently store a complete multilevel bill of material as well as the “as-built” routings and notes for the configured product. That eliminates the need to maintain old designs in current engineering standards or in hard-to access manual files. TCM As-Built History gives you instant access to historical manufacturing data, which can significantly improve customer service levels.

Customer Order Worksheet

Here’s the Customer Order Worksheet. It’s easy to navigate, using expandable, explorer-like drill downs to collapse or expand information as needed.

As you can see, configured item including Options, BOM, & Ship Schedule information.

And you can access documents by customer, order or item as needed.

Customer Order Detail

Each item allows you to display multiple drill downs, including ATP, sales, backlog, pricing and BOM.

The Customer Order detail line includes several tabs of detailed information. Here you can see the Line maintenance, including the item’s description, line #, quantity and pricing.

Available to Promise

Here’s an example using Available to Promise.

As you can see, promise dates can be assigned, the details of scheduled shipments and receipts are also displayed.

Reporting

COP provides extensive reporting, including Sales/Booking Reporting, with over 32 Reports/Displays with 14 Selection Criteria each!

Liability and Warranty

In today’s customer–oriented manufacturing environment, your job does not end when you ship the product — so being able to accurately track events and materials is crucial. This is especially true in heavily regulated industries.

After the product is shipped, TCM’s Liability and Warranty module tracks both terms of warranty and service events for the life of the product. To accomplish this, the module allows serializing of finished inventory and tracks the serial number’s shipment to the customer. It also integrates with other TCM functions to provide you with lot control and tracking to original raw material lot numbers.

In short, Liability & Warranty gives you tighter control of business operations and increased awareness of customer events — as well as an easier, more effective way to deal with regulatory compliance.

Control over Serial Numbers

When you ship an order, you can decide whether the Serial Numbers will be automatically assigned or assigned individually by range.

Whichever you choose, your Serial Numbers can be printed on several selected documents. Here you can see the serial # on the Packing Slip.

And, a detail Serial Number Record is automatically generated from shipping and billing.

You can even track Service and Replacement Parts against a serial number to maintain accurate warranty records.

Finally, you have many serial number report options available including By Customer, Item, Expiration Date, Service Code, or Shipment Date. This report is an example of Serial Numbers by Customer.