Unit 5 - Projects

In Unit 5, we will gather several items related to your projects. We have six items to discuss in this Unit: Categories, Confirmations, Sources, Abandoned Reasons, Document Templates, and Email Templates. You can add categories, confirmations, and sources to the provided spreadsheet "Kompass_Configuration and Business Processes.xlsx", while abandoned reasons and templates will be prepared in separate meetings.


Categories

Project categories categorize projects, for example an infrastructure project or residential project. They focus on the project; not on the client, the contact, or anything else. These categories are totally independent attributes and just a way to categorize data. See graph below:

As we already saw see in Unit 3 - Clients, project categories, and client categories are not the same and they can be significantly different.


Client Categories, Project Categories, Departments, and Services can confuse. In the example below, we will try to define each one of them.

You have set three departments in your organization: Survey, Scanning, and CAD processing.

One of the big four consultancy firms, has to provide a transportation strategy to their client. To do so, they need to know the exact location of all bus stops at your near-by city.

You have decided that you should initially GPS the sites to find their actual location. Then you will conventionally survey them. As part of an additional request, you have been asked to scan them using a LiDAR unit. You process the point clouds and then deliver your CAD drawings. All those works have been priced separately.


Your departments are: Survey, Scanning, CAD processing.

Your services can be:

  • "GPS", "Conventional survey" under Survey.
  • "LiDAR", "Point Cloud processing" under Scanning.
  • "CAD" under CAD Processing.

Your client category is: Consultancy.

Your project category is: Transportation.


Confirmations

For a project to be officially confirmed, organizations typically require a form of a written instruction. Most often this will come in the form of a contract, purchase order, or an email order form. However, you have the option to define your own type(s) of project confirmation by listing them in the relevant sheet of the spreadsheet.

Sources

In Unit 4, we defined contact sources and how they discover your organization. Project source has a slightly different approach, and it is used to capture the source of each individual project. Some possible examples are:

  • Email
  • Phone
  • Referral
  • Repeat Customer
  • Website
  • CrossUp Sell
  • Public Tender
  • Framework

You can list your organization’s sources in the spreadsheet.


Abandoned Reasons

Not all proposals will turn into projects. Some will inevitably be lost and will have to be abandoned. There is a variety of possible reasons why a project may have been abandoned, such as:

  • lost bid
  • cancelled project
  • programme
  • price
  • not priced
  • technical
  • unknown

You have the ability to define your own abandoned reasons for these projects. This helps you better understand any possible trends within your industry or organization. Again, feel free to let us know if the provided list of reasons need to be edited for your unique case.


Document Templates

You might remember that in Unit 3, we requested samples of your invoices to automate their preparation in Kompass. In addition to invoices, there are other documents that can be automated as well. This includes commonly used documents such as proposal letters, project handovers, sales proposals, and risk assessments. We can help you through this process to ensure the system best matches your requirements and tasks. Please share with us any documents you usually use and we will program them to work through Kompass.

Email Templates

Kompass can also send automated emails to certain employees with certain triggers. The ones predominately used by our customers are emails informing managers that a proposal has been accepted or when a project has been delivered. However, there are of course many other triggers that can be implemented. Normally, an email as such will look like the text below, but you can always change the appearance if desired to: (fields in curled brackets are automatically populated by Kompass).
Estimator {{ project.quoted_by.name }}
Price {{ project.price_net|curr(symbol=project.currency) }}
Gross Margin {{ project.gross_margin|int }}%
Departments {{ dept.name }}: {{ dept.amount_net|curr(symbol=project.currency) }}
Services {{ service.name }} ({{ service.department.name }}): {{ service.amount_net|curr(symbol=project.currency) }}
Sales Stream {{ project.category.name }}
Deadline {{ project.deadline|date }}
Field {{ project.field_days|dec }} Days {{ project.field_hours|dec }} Hours
Office {{ project.office_days|dec }} Days {{ project.office_hours|dec }} Hours
Company Office {{ project.office.name }}
Details {{ project.details|nl2br }}

Additionally, we can create an email template for directly sending invoices from Kompass to your clients. If so, apart from defining the template itself, we will have to add two TXT entries to your DNS server where the [clientname].com domain is configured.

In the next unit, we will cover several items necessary to efficiently and effectively use Kompass.

Unit 6 - Proposal Items

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.

Still need help? Contact Us Contact Us