CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
21 August 2007
Implementation Investments
K&L Microwave Uses IFS CRM Solution for A&D Sales
IFS announced that K&L Microwave , a subsidiary of Dover Corporation, has gone live on the IFS Sales and Marketing customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
K&L Microwave had been running IFS Applications for enterprise resources planning (ERP) since 2002, but in November of 2006 decided they needed a system that would integrate sales, engineering and quality department activities involved in quoting. As an engineer-to-order (ETO) company, K&L Microwave had more demanding requirements that many other CRM solutions could not meet.
Quoting is a vital and complex process for K&L Microwave, as the company designs and manufactures RF and microwave filters, duplexers and subassemblies, engineering each product to the specifications of defense and homeland security and commercial customers.
According to Global Customer Service Manager Yvonne Downie, the company hoped to better facilitate engineering tasks and projects involved with quoting, and also link part numbers by government programs.
"So much of our success in securing business has to do with how quickly we can turn around a quote or a prototype," Downie said. "We want to turn quotes around within 48 hours when we can. This involves decreasing all the turnaround time associated with any task/project involved in finalizing the quote for the customer. As of this month we can track and control all of the metrics associated with turning a quote quickly. It helps in this regard that we can now see how much quoting activity each of our engineering groups are assigned at any given time so we can balance quoting against other engineering work necessary to release products to manufacturing."
Because K&L Microwave performs a significant amount of work for customers working on Department of Defense contracts, the ability to tie part numbers, estimates and opportunities to specific government programs is critical. Using IFS Workshop Tool Kit, K&L Microwave Systems Analyst Phil Shields was able to personalize the IFS solution to track government programs and relate them to part numbers, sales opportunities and other activities.
"We were able to easily add fields and tables to the various tabs within IFS Sales and Marketing to meet our team's requirements," Shields said. "The IFS Workshop Tool Kit was very easy to use and very powerful."
"At IFS, we believe that back-office CRM -- CRM that ties sales functionality into other information from throughout the company -- is going to be attractive to many companies in the 21st Century," IFS CRM Senior Product Advisor Jorge Defreitas said. "It used to be that you did business with people you know. In the 21st Century, you do business with people who know you and leverage that knowledge to serve you better. That is what K&L is able to achieve here with their very well-planned instance of IFS Sales & Marketing."
According to K&L Microwave Sales Territory Manager Jeff Burkett, a key benefit of the new solution is increased visibility across sales and quoting functions, resulting in the ability to use existing information about customers and the government programs they are working on.
"Let's say a territory manager is working with a customer in Arizona, and we get information that suggests a different company in Massachusetts is working on the same program. They likely will need something similar to what we are working on for the company out west. We can leverage engineering time we have already invested to pursue that business," Burkett said, adding that the same information on government programs can help K&L Microwave pursue business when prime contracts change hands.
"If we are supplying parts to one of our customers and the program they are working on moves to another prime contractor, our new CRM will help us make decisions about how to handle it," Burkett said. "We now know what parts we are supplying to that program, and if we are making $5 million in parts per year for the program, we can devote a different level of engineering effort to pursuing the business than if we are supplying $100,000 of parts per year for that program."
Rapid deployment
The team installed IFS Sales and Marketing at K&L Microwave in late November of 2006, and the company went live on the CRM application on January 15th. After the initial go-live, Shields led a team to design changes to handle estimating and tracking activities by government programs, and went live on the solution March 12.
More recently, K&L Microwave extended its IFS Applications functionality to communicate with their team of independent manufacturer representatives. As of mid-2007, information on customers and prospects can be exported and shared with outside sales representatives who return to K&L Microwave data that is imported to IFS Applications and used in K&L Microwave's sales forecasting efforts. Shields said that K&L Microwave will consider adding IFS Portals to allow manufacturer representatives to more directly access IFS Applications.
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