Bespoke Quotation System

IMTEX Controls is an independent producer / supplier of valve / damper actuation equipment and ancillary control systems sold primarily into the oil & gas (onshore & offshore), power generation and marine industries.

Cambridge Software Engineering Ltd (CSE) delivered a new quotation solution for Imtex Controls. The application replaces an existing manual process for the creation of technical quotations; automating their internal processes and integrating seamlessly with their CRM system.

At Imtex Controls, we are always looking to improve the service we provide to our clients. We recognised that fast turnaround of quotations was critical to ensuring that both we and our clients have the best opportunity of securing an order so we contacted CSE to design a bespoke system to facilitate this. CSE were quick to grasp the complexities involved in sizing and specifying our products and were then able to develop a simple to use, scalable system that accurately reflected the thought processes we went through to compile an accurate quotation. I will be using Cambridge Software again for future projects and would be happy to recommend their services to anyone. - Paul Turner, Director.

Quotation System Dashboard
Actuator Sizing Criteria
Actuator Dashboard

Imtex Controls is an independent producer/supplier of valve/damper actuation equipment and ancillary control systems sold primarily into the oil & gas (onshore & offshore), power generation & marine industries.

Challenges

In a continually evolving strategy to develop their business, the management team at Imtex Controls had identified the need to accelerate the quotation process. This would provide them with the competitive edge needed to ensure that they and their clients had the best opportunity to secure new orders. To define suitable valve/damper actuation equipment to meet a client’s specification requires technical knowledge held within the engineering team. This creates a pinch point in their quotation process, as it depends on the engineers’ availability to complete this before the quotation can be created by the sales team.

Consequently Imtex Controls wished to commission the development of a software solution that semiautomates quote generation, streamlining the process in order to make it more efficient, de-skilled and scalable whilst maintaining the quality of the output. Their aim was to enable a salesperson to add the details of the criteria for the actuator and the control equipment parts defined in a schematic (produced by the engineering team) and then be provided with the choice of actuators/parts to select from. Once defined, a price list would be used to produce a total cost and a quotation document generated from this. The system would then generate a bill of materials (BOM) from the quotation.

Process

CSE worked with Imtex Controls to define the requirements for the new software solution, learning about their business processes, sector terminology, existing business systems and the complexities of the quotation process in order to understand how best to design a system that fulfilled their needs. This consisted of several face to face meetings with them, the development of process flows for the user journeys and the creation of a high level database design.

Once these had been defined and ratified by Imtex Controls, CSE produced an initial prototype to validate the development approach and systems design. This then formed the basis of the development of the complete system, which was delivered in four phases to provide regular feedback from them as the development progressed.

Technology

Microsoft ASP.Net MVC - A patterns-based application development framework for building dynamic websites that enables a clean separation of concerns.
Microsoft Entity Framework - An object-relational mapper that enables .NET developers to work with relational data using domain-specific objects.
SQL Server Database - Enterprise scalable relational data warehouse and data integration services with easy to use, robust, management and development tools.
Visual Studio Online – Secure centralised source control and application lifecycle management tool.

Further Information

For more information about this case study, or our services please contact Nick Rogers on 01223 968100.

Process

Technology

Further Information

Recent Blog Entries

Contact Us