Expand Your Business with Job Management

You can associate multiple customers with a job. Since bid requests from different contractors may have different counts, you can create customer-specific bids with their unique counts. Once the bids are created, you can easily send requests for quotes (RFQ) to vendors via fax or email. Manually enter updated prices from vendors to compare pricing and decide which vendors to use for the job.

For some items, you’ll have unit prices, while others will be lot prices. Job Management lets you handle both, indicating at the line item level how the item is priced. Should you decide to unit price the entire job, an intuitive print feature allows you to generate a customer-facing quote lot priced.

To manage bid deadlines, use the Bid Board. You can quickly see which bids are due, along with the respective times and jobs. Easily send bids to customers via email, fax, or printed forms from this interface.

After awarding a job to a customer and finalizing cost/sell information with vendors and the customer, you can create purchase orders (POs) for the items on the BOM. Job Management allows you to create different types of POs, such as Reserve POs, Hold for Release POs, and Release POs, to manage the ordering and shipping process.

• Reserve POs: This reserves the order number for future use and sends the number to the vendor. Reserve POs are not required, however, your vendor might require a PO number prior to working with you regarding pricing for the job.
• Hold for Release POs: These tell your vendor what items you need for the job and create a direct order in Eclipse, but they don’t authorize the vendor to ship any items to your customer. As the job progresses, you authorize the vendor to send shipments of the items using Release POs. Hold for Release POs are not required unless you are creating partial releases for a job. Hold for Release POs are useful as a communication tool to tell your vendor what items you need for the job—especially when you are ordering a large number of items.
• Release POs: These tell your vendor that they can ship items to your customer and generate a direct order in Eclipse, based on the customer and vendor information specified for the job. If you create a Release PO for stock items, the system creates a standard sales order—not a direct order.

Job Management allows you to track and process change orders, making changes such as quantity or pricing updates to the items you are ordering from vendors. Change orders provide a way to send pending or approved orders to customers or vendors regarding updates to material required for the job.

You can keep track of awarded and lost jobs using Job Management. For lost jobs, note the competitor and reason for the loss. This helps you analyze your win-to-loss ratio and assess the value of lost jobs. When a job is awarded, you can enter customer details like contact, shipping, and credit information. Use the Job Summary page to track the job's overall status, finances, transactions, settings, and documents.

You can continue to negotiate costs with your vendors and sell prices with the customer. Adjust the BOM as needed before generating purchase orders for the job.

The Financial Summary provides a real-time financial picture of a job, tracking transactions through the entire job history and reporting costs and margins as the job progresses. It allows you to compare costs and margins on initial totals with current job totals and change orders, see a summary by vendor, and view customer invoices and payments.

Job Management allows for submittal tracking, which is used for record-keeping purposes or for approval regarding the contents of the BOM prior to ordering items for the jobs from vendors. Submittals let you attach specifications or detail sheets to the items.

The Bid Board helps you manage bid deadlines by displaying bids by day and showing the time and job that needs to be handled. It allows you to send bids to customers using email, fax, or by mailing printed forms.

Job Management offers complete management of customer-owned inventory via the Direct Through Stock process. Customers can order and purchase stock through the standard order entry process and request that you house the material in your warehouse to be delivered later or piecemeal as needed.

For some of your jobs, you might work with a manufacturer representative. These representatives help source, cost, and bundle materials for large, complex jobs. They identify the necessary materials and determine the best manufacturers and product types. In return, you pay them an engineering fee. You can define these fees on the BOM, create purchase orders, and apply the fees during the receiving process.

Job Management tracks job profitability from beginning to end, providing a Financial Summary that offers a financial snapshot of the job at any time. It helps reduce errors associated with complex jobs and centralizes all project information.