How to spot the gap between manufacturing capability and sales systems.
Your shop can build far more than your systems can quote. That gap costs you quotes, time and engineering hours, and it rarely shows up in a report.
Here's why it happens. Take an illustrative fiber patch cord: ten connector choices at each end, six fiber types, four jacket types, and lengths from 1 foot to 1,000 feet in 1-foot steps. That's 10 × 10 × 6 × 4 × 1,000, or 2.4 million theoretical combinations before you apply a single compatibility rule or add polish, pulling eyes or labels. Some of those can't be built, and the valid count depends on the product family. Across a whole product line, the possibilities can run into the billions.
Your ERP, though, wants every part number set up before you can quote it, order it or build it. Nobody can set up millions of part numbers in advance, and nobody should, because many part numbers get quoted and never ordered. So the system can quote what's been set up, and everything else waits for a person.
Just because you can make it doesn't mean you have a cost for it.
How to spot the gap
You probably have a gap if several of these sound familiar:
- Sales has to go to engineering every time they quote something that's never been quoted before.
- Nearly every order needs a new part number.
- Your ordering guide is a PDF with a part-number legend, and salespeople build the numbers by hand. A PDF can describe your products, but it can't stop someone choosing a combination you can't build.
- A customer asks how much for the 280-footer, and the answer has to wait for someone. Or they send 15 lengths of the same design and need a price for each.
- You stock a handful of standard cables but get asked to quote far more.
- Orders go into your ERP as estimates because the bill of materials isn't set up yet, or a line has to be deleted and keyed in again.
- Your ERP limits how long a part number can be, so the number that describes the product doesn't fit.
When I ran sales at Fiber Connections, we never found an ERP that could handle billions of possible part numbers, at least not without spending millions of dollars. We built our own systems more than once, and quoting was still the hard part.
Measure it with the requests you actually get
The gap that matters isn't the millions of combinations nobody will ever order. It's the requests customers actually send that can't be quoted without someone stepping in.
- Pick one product family and a period, such as last month, and gather every quote request for that family.
- Set aside the incomplete ones, where the customer hadn't given you enough to quote. Track them separately.
- Sort the rest into three piles:
- quoted through your normal process, with nobody stepping in;
- familiar products held up by something missing, like a rule, a cost or a part number that had to be set up;
- genuinely new work that needed engineering.
- For the held-up requests, note how long each one waited and why. As soon as a quote leaves one person's desk and waits on somebody else, it goes into a bit of a black hole, so the waiting time often tells you more than the hands-on time.
Your routine share is the first pile divided by all three. For example, with made-up numbers: of 100 requests, 5 were incomplete. Of the other 95, 62 went through routinely, 21 waited on a missing rule, cost or setup, and 12 needed engineering. That's 62 ÷ 95, or about 65% routine.
The 21 are your gap: work you already know how to do, held up by something you could have written down. The 12 are real engineering work, and they should stay that way.
Close the gap with rules, not more part numbers
You don't close the gap by setting up more part numbers. You close it by writing down what engineering already knows.
- Capture the rules. Engineering already knows which options go together, from connector and cable compatibility to polarity and breakout lengths, and how each one affects the part number and the cost. Often everyone knows the rules; there's just no part number or cost yet. Write the rules down, one product family at a time.
- Generate the part number when you quote. The part number doesn't have to exist in a database first. It can be created the moment all the choices are made, along with its description and cost.
- Set it up in your ERP when it's ordered. Create the part and its bill of materials when the order comes in, not when the quote goes out.
- Keep true one-offs visible. A brand-new cable or a special print won't fit the rules, and that's fine. Give it its own part number and a recorded cost, and keep the answer for the next time someone asks.
Once the rules for a family are written down, run the same count again. The routine share should go up, and what's left needing engineering is the work that deserves an engineer's time.
Your next step: run the count for one product family over last month, and list the three most common reasons requests were held up.
If you'd like to measure the gap on one of your product families together, book a walkthrough.
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