Invite Your Suppliers to the RFQ Party with Fusion 360

JEREMY SMITH: Hello, good day. Thanks for joining me. I'm going to be giving a demonstration on how we at IMAGINiT use Fusion 360 Manage to improve supplier workflow inside of our customers companies.

I'll focus on the common process of RFQs, or request for quotes, and how they could be automated and tracked in a common system. I'll used terms and acronyms frequently throughout this demo. PLM, or product lifecycle management, is the overarching way product data is maintained in an organization.

Fusion 360 Manage, or Manage for short, is the Autodesk product that we use to achieve this. I'll be using the terms PLM and Manage interchangeably. Here's just a little bit about me.

I'm a mechanical engineer who's designed everything from water pumping stations to restaurant equipment to architectural lighting. I'm currently a PLM Solutions consultant at IMAGINiT Technologies. There's more about me in my bio so let's get right to the topic at hand.

So what problem are we solving? Traditionally, there's a heavy reliance on Microsoft Excel and emails for tracking and communicating RFQs. Sometimes a pen and paper is still even used for approvals, which makes it very difficult to continue operating in our COVID and post-COVID world where we're not all in the office.

Does this process up here look familiar? Sales gets a customer request for a new part or product, or even a customization to an existing product. The sales order goes to an engineering manager who delegates it to an engineer.

The engineer uses CAD to design the part, PDFs it and attaches it to an email to procurement since they usually don't have CAD or PDM access. Procurement works up an RFQ in some other form, PDFs it, attaches it to multiple emails to one or more suppliers.

The supplier then uses their own internal system to work up a quote, which is then emailed back to procurement who forwards it along to the engineer. And this cycle may iterate through several revisions, finally, being released for production. And what does this all mean?

Well, at any stage of this process, there are multiple copies of the drawing and RFQ sitting on network folders or worse yet, hard drives. This doesn't even include the phone calls and verbal requirements, which become tribal knowledge and are never documented. We're looking at seven or more wall throws and four or more drawing versions stored on more than three different systems.

And we could do better than this. And in this highly competitive day and age, I daresay we need to. Let me show you how we used Fusion 360 Manage to improve this procedure.

I'll be wearing three different hats during this demo, engineer, purchaser and supplier. You won't see me log in and out as one user and in-- log out as one user and in as another. But I will say when I'm taking on that role of the purchaser or the supplier while I run through these steps.

OK, so let's fire up Fusion 360 Manage and I'll show you how we used it to solve this problem. Starting with the first way-- we actually did two ways. The first way and the simpler way, is doing what we called an internal RFQ process. So if we go over here, we have an RFQ internal workspace.

This is started by me or the engineer I had today-- I'll be an engineer-- who needs an RFQ for a new item. It'll be for our new bracket for a new product. I'm the originator of it. And it's for our new cement polisher. And I need it on Friday.

And here, we could pick a number of teams that may be in your supply chain. I'm going to request the internal request team right here. That's the extent of what I have to do as an engineer needing a new part quoted.

At this point, it takes these team members and pulls them in here. So this is like a pool of individuals or a quorum, if you will, who all get emails saying, hey, there's a need out there as a request for a quote. So when I'm done I can say, all right, I filled out my part and send a request.

And here, we actually get a warning that you need an attachment for the item on your quote. If I go back here and look at the item, I was moving too fast and did not have the attachment on here. So purchasing doesn't even what they're quoted or to send-- what they're quoting or what to send to purchasing.

So I'll go back in here and upload my bracket drawing. Go back to the RFQ, try again. At this point, the workflow's moved on and all of these individuals have gotten emails. Looks something like this.

There's an internal request from Jeremy looking for a-- looking for an RFQ. So at this stage, I'll log in as Jeremy purchaser and say, all right, this looks like the kind of part that I quote. I will edit this.

And this usually goes to my sheet metal suppliers. Choose these two, ABO and Abercon. And I need 10, 50 and 100 of these. No NDAs required, they already have one a file for us. And I'll just add in, needed this month, or some sort of node to go to them in the email.

I will save, at which point, I can send it and say my supplier info is complete. When I say that, notice this tab populates right here. If we look over, it took whoever I added as suppliers and adds them to this grid tab so we can start to record the information.

At this stage, I, as a purchaser, would work outside the system to send emails or phone calls or whatever system is in place outside of there to get this information to the suppliers in these cases that the supplier does not have access to the system. That's why it's the internal process and the simpler of the two.

So after I've sent my emails and done what I've had to do, I'll come back in here and say, you know what? Suppliers have the RFQs cues and we're waiting on responses from them. Which there's is another email goes out, letting the originator-- the engineer know that we're in this stage, keeping them abreast of all the situations going on or of the status.

As the info comes back, I, as a purchaser, will go in here and edit this information. So Abercon will give me 1, 2, 3, 4 supplier quote with a tooling cost or $500. 10 will cost me $4. 50 will cost me $3. And 100 will cost me $2.

And ABO came back with A, B, C, D. $450 tooling cost, but slightly more expensive in the per cost, let's say. And $3 here. So given this, and then I've got all the information back and entered here, I can choose to award it to Abercon in this case and hit Save and Complete, which locks down this RFQ.

If we go back now to Items Details tab, we see all the information is done and complete. And if we go and look at the item, Abercon has been added as the manufacturer since they were awarded it. And over in our Related tabs, the RFQ has been added as a related document or workspace to this item so that they're always saying and bidirectionally, the information's there at your fingertips back and forth.

That concludes the internal process. Next, I am going to cover the external process that we created. All right, so that was one way to solve this. Flip on over and here's the second way.

So in this scenario, we allow suppliers into the system where they have a role in a group and permissions to enter the system under the participant license. So given that case, we use the RFQ external process.

It's starting to make a new one here. It starts off very similarly, filled out by the originator-- the engineer looking for it. We'll do the same thing here. We'll get our bracket.

We'll add me as the originator. It's our cement polisher and we also need this by Friday. And in this case, we'll pick our external request team.

So it starts off similarly with the workflow actions. I will say, all right, I've done my part. Everyone in the team gets their emails. I will not log in as the purchaser. Take a look at this record and say, OK, I'm going to use the same two suppliers, do the same MLQs.

10, 50 and 100. Similarly, notes in NDA not required. I'll hit save. And my supplier info is complete.

Here's where it diverges from the other workflow process. What happens here is instead of using a grid tab, two other records are made for each supplier in the Supplier Quote workspace. So this is another workspace for just supplier quotes.

So now, if we go out and look, this is me as the supplier. And I've got a request email for a quote for our new bracket. So if I click that link, it'll send me over into My Supplier Quote. And as you can see, these will be-- I will only see the quotes that I have done that I am an owner for as part of my group and my permissions.

So now that I'm logged in as the supplier-- the third party supplier, I'll take a look at my workflow actions. And I can look at and say, hey, I need more information. Here, which will go back to the purchaser to add that information, I can choose to no bid it. It's not my cup of tea.

Or I can complete the quote, which is what I will do right now. I will edit it. Say there's a one time tooling cost of $1000. That's three weeks or 21 days. And we'll cue, carry over from the request. So it saves a lot of data entry there.

They're looking for 10, 5, 4 and 3. And these will be seven days. And you can have notes on any of this or just say here, thanks for the opportunity. There's some terms that can go in each of the emails. Some boilerplate stuff, if needed.

So I filled in my information, completed the quote-- oh, there's one thing I missed here was my quote number from my system would be something like this. We will save it. And I will go over to my workflow actions and say that I've completed the quote.

At which stage, more emails have gone out, letting everyone know that that has happened. And it is now sitting back in the purchaser's world. So I will log in as a purchaser, take a look at this, take a look at the quote, see that everything looks pretty good.

And here, I will award the quote. So award that business here. And a quote's been awarded. We can go back to the RFQ that generated this, and if we go to the Workflow Actions, it is automatically no longer waiting for that response. It is automatically moved over to complete.

So the RFQ is complete and the supplier is complete-- supply quote is complete. Similarly, if we go back to the Items Details tab and open up this bracket, we'll see, in this case, ABO has been added as a manufacturer. And that external RFQ is here also.

Another thing that we additionally did here is to create a quote analysis report. So you could have three or four or five suppliers here. So a nice way to be able to view that all at one time is to have this link to a report.

So what we've also done is have this View Report here, which is a hyperlink to an advanced print view. If you're curious as how to do this, please refer to the handout where I've added the HTML that's needed to accomplish this. But if we open this up, you can see here, it's a nice grid layout of all the suppliers and the RFQ and the information consolidating what they did and how they quoted it.

In this case, we didn't even wait for Abercon, we just awarded ABO. But it would give all the information here in a nice reportable, viewable format. So that covers what we did with this workspace. I'm going to jump back out to the PowerPoint now.

All right, so there were the two different ways we use technology, specifically PLM, to dramatically improve a common everyday business process that a lot of our customers are seeing, and I, myself, as an engineer, I have seen dozens of times. And also what we found is that when our customers started to use this, they started to think about other processes like purchase requisitions or tooling shot tracking that could benefit from a similar discipline. So I mean, with that, I'd like to open up the floor to questions.