We are a medium-sized craft business specializing in glass construction, repair glazing, door technology, and building components (windows and front doors). We also have a large division for the maintenance and repair of windows, doors, smoke/fire doors, automatic doors, etc. (field management).
Last year, we completed over 5,000 orders, have almost 1,000 maintenance contracts in our portfolio and almost 4,000 systems.
We are looking for a modern ERP system with time recording and field management, as we have reached the limits of our requirements with our previous provider and further development of the software is only possible to a limited extent, as it is software for metal construction/steel construction.
The current ERP system runs on our own server in-house. However, we are not opposed to a cloud solution in principle. The accounting software is connected externally via interfaces. A special glass calculation software is also connected—the calculated data is imported into our current ERP system in an Excel file into the preliminary calculation position in the project.
We have the following requirements for the software:
- Project and order processing, including
- post-calculation
- Creation of calculation items with access to the article master
- Quotation
- Order confirmations
- Orders
- Material requirements, warehouse withdrawal slips
- Various invoice types (X invoices, partial invoices, advance payment invoices, final invoices, invoice corrections, etc.)
- Consideration of times from time recording
- Project groups with their own number ranges (currently 8 digits), as we have several departments and profit centers
- CRM module for customer communication
- Field management:
- Asset management with QR code function, maintenance planning, and asset history
- Fault response
- Personnel and team planning
- Spare parts processing
- Maintenance and repair work (offline-capable mobile service calls)
- Option to create emergency service calls
- Contract planner, etc.
- Customized reports, such as test reports, documentation, etc.
- Signature function
- Maintenance contracts with the option of increasing contract prices uniformly
- Individual hourly rates for customer groups, travel times, flat-rate items
- Merchandise management:
- Article management with warehousing
- Purchasing/procurement including order proposals (reorder points)
- Complaints
- Price management (purchase and sales prices)
- Inventory function for warehouses and vehicles
- Document management including the option to automatically post incoming invoices and store the documents in the data record (the same applies to delivery notes for orders)
- Customized reports (outgoing invoices, quotes, etc.)
- Customized header and footer texts
- Outgoing invoices:
- Compliance with German Value Added Tax Act
- When creating invoices, automatically store the relevant supporting documents when sending emails (invoice and supporting documents in a PDF)
- Display of the processed assets or asset locations in the respective outgoing invoice
- Option to store multiple invoice recipients and service recipients who differ from the client (which are then also taken into account in the invoicing)
- Selection of various tax types
- Human resources including
- rights system
- Time recording
- Personnel file
- Vacation management with corresponding notification functions
- Interfaces:
- Since an external accounting program is available, we also need interfaces for exporting accounts payable and accounts receivable as well as incoming and outgoing invoices (posting entries). We also require a report on monthly stock withdrawals for projects and vehicles.
- It must also be possible to import the aforementioned data from the existing calculation program.
- Furthermore, it must be possible to import account statements.
- Other “gimmicks”:
- Information from the customer master should pop up in a kind of tooltip window when creating quotations and invoices
- Service recipients should be able to be created on a project-specific basis rather than on a customer-specific basis; this service recipient should appear automatically on the outgoing invoice
- Mandatory fields when creating projects and contact details.
- Global change of billing addresses for customers who are related to multiple projects.
- Option to define fixed flat rates in outgoing invoices so that they do not have to be entered manually each time.
A total of around 30 software workstations are planned for internal and external use.