Project Details

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Sales Quote Generation Software

Company: The Manitowoc Company, Inc.

Major(s):
Primary: CMPSC
Secondary: IE

Non-Disclosure Agreement: YES

Intellectual Property: YES

Potain is a leading manufacturer of tower cranes, both self-erecting and top-slewing tower cranes, with sales around the world. The North American sales team is currently looking to develop a software package that will aid the quoting process for new tower cranes. Currently, when a customer expresses interest in purchasing a new Potain, the sales team must pick all of the options that the customer wants on a master price list, and they then write a quote for that crane that specifies all of the selected options and the price for the crane. This writing of the quote is done manually in Microsoft Word and is very prone to mistakes. Plus, each of the sales managers have a slightly different format for the quotes that they write. The students will be tasked with developing a software tool that can be used to generate quotes for the sales team. The software must be able to read in a pricelist, as prices change 1-2 times per year. The user interface of the program should allow for the sales managers to select the model of crane and then any of the options available on that particular crane. Different profiles for the customers and sales managers would also be helpful, as each quote is addressed to the customer and from their respective sales manager. Once all of the selections have been made, the program should then generate a .pdf file of the final quote that the sales manager can then send to the customer. Several stretch goals of this project would be to include shipping calculations. Potain builds their tower cranes in Western Europe for the most part, so ocean freight is always included in quotes to North American customers. Different crane models require a different number of containers, so it would be nice if the model designation generated a shipping quote automatically. Also, a cloud-based solution would be preferrable. This would allow the sales managers to access the software tool from anywhere and easily recall past quotes.