Hi Community,

We’re trying to find a smooth and effective way of creating quotes and change orders in IFS Cloud, but are struggling with coming up with something.

Scenario 1:

1. Customer sends us a Request for maintenance, with the symptom of the part to be maintained.
2. We send a Cost Estimate to the customer, based on experience with the reported symptom.
3. Customer sends the component to be maintained.
4. We create a Work Order and start the maintenance.
5. During inspection, we see additional repair required, and needs customer approval for this.
6. During service we reach the agreed Maintenance Cost levels, and needs customer approval to increase this.

Scenario 2:

1. Customer sends us the Customer order and the component, and wants us to inspect and report maintenance requirements.
2. We create a Work Order
3. We start disassembly, inspection and test, before we send a Cost Estimate to the customer. (Hours are logged)
4. The rest is similar to Scenario 1 steps 5 and 6.

Regarding IFS Cloud support for the scenarios

Scenario 1: We have discussed using Service Quotation as the initial Quotation to cover step 2, and Sales Quotations to cover the additional work required in step 5. We don’t see a way of covering step 6, since all quotes in IFS Cloud seem to use planned information and not care about actuals.

Scenario 2: Since the status is more or less unknown on the part to be maintained, and we start work on the part before creating the quote, we are not sure how to handle this in IFS Cloud. We have talked about using Service Quotation for the disassembly, inspection and test, and using Sales quotation to quote the findings. But how can we give the customer a good picture of the complete maintenance cost?

Our preferred way of working would be something like:

1. When we receive a request for service, with the symptom of the part to be serviced, we create a quotation based on previous work/experience. This quoted value should be linked to the service/maintenance so we can see when we are getting close to the cap.
2. For work on parts that needs to be disassembled, inspected and tested to get the parts status, we would like to create a quote after this initial work where the quote should contain Actuals for the completed Work Tasks, and Estimates for the Work tasks not started.
3. If we find additional service required during work, we would like to create an additional quote for this.
4. If we see that we are going to go beyond the agreed Maintenance Costs, we would like to create a Change order.
5. In addition, we would like to be able to add additional cost to the quotations, even if it’s not planned. This could be estimated travel expenses, workshop material (non inventory parts like gloves and rags), etc..

It seems like IFS Cloud assumes that all faults and work is known prior to starting maintenance, but this is rarely the case. Change Orders and additional work is sadly a big part of our maintenance process.

We’re most likely not going at this the best way, so would like to know of smart ways to handle this.