Sales:

 

Opportunity – Begin with Opportunity. An Opportunity may have no Sales Quotes or it may have many Sales Quotes. An Opportunity leads to a Sales Order.

 

Sales Quote – Quoting may be part of the process of closing a sale, and it can be a bit of a conversation. Multiple Sales Quotes can be used to show different configurations or possibilities to a customer, but since the customer is going to choose only one, all of those Sales Quotes would be under the same Opportunity.

 

Sales Order – A customer submits an order to us so we make a Sales Order. A Sales Order should reference an Opportunity, if there was any anticipation of the order within the Organization. A Sales Order may reference a Sales Quote (which in turn references an Opportunity, which should be the same Opportunity that the Sales Order references) if the customer’s order indicates a particular Sales Quote or if there is any other reason or benefit to make reference to a particular Sales Quote.

After a Sales Order is created and filled out, it is routed for Approval. The approval process is the hand-off process from Sales to the Organization. It is essentially the process of permeating the membrane, of bringing an order from outside (the customer, the order as stated by the customer / as presented by Sales) to inside the organization (internal stakeholders, the order as agreed to by the internal parties that will be answerable for the various commitments made on acceptance of the order). From here the flow splits, with one new flow starting in Finance and one new flow starting in Operations.

 

Finance:

Invoice – Depending on the Payment Terms that are listed on the Sales Order, Invoices may be ready to be sent immediately upon Sales Order Approval or they may be offset from Approval by some period or they may be held as Drafts until the Sales Order ( or parts of it ) are fulfilled, or by some offset from that.

Operations:

Operations performs the process of supplying the Demand 

Shipping Record – A Sales Order may be ordered to be Fulfilled All Concurrently, meaning to the Organization “don’t ship any until you can ship all”. Reasons for a customer to choose this may include protection of or lack of intermediate storage space or preventing the unnecessarily early incursion of payment liability (triggering Payment Terms or timers) when a partially fulfilled order is not of sufficient use. Other times, the design of the line items will communicate the fulfillment strategy.