How MakerOS Combines Sales Pipelines and Production Workflows for 3D Printing Companies, and Why It’s Important to Do So

For any fabrication company, sales and engineering teams need to work together to deliver projects efficiently, yet they rarely communicate or collaborate in an efficient way. This is why MakerOS launched its collaboration platform for fabrication companies, specifically 3D printing service providers, back in 2015. Following some upgrades, it released version 2.0 of its online platform last month. As a matter of fact, there is high-demand for a solution that will help companies manage multiple projects at a time. After a threshold, it becomes nearly impossible to sync sales and engineering teams if processes are not centralized. Why is that so?

Almost all fabrication companies, especially 3D printing companies, have a process in place to receive new projects and a process to produce those projects. In the sales pipeline, a company will have a visual snapshot of where prospects are in the sales process, showing the sales team how many deals they can expect to close in a given week or month. These deals represent projects that need to be assigned to production. In most cases, the sales pipeline and production workflow are not synced, giving rise to many inefficiencies. For example, the sales team is rarely looped into the status of their clients’ projects. If they want to have some updates they will need to ask someone from the engineering team directly, which you can imagine, is not ideal.

Project management solutions exist, but usually sales data is first registered on a separate software, typically a CRM tool, and then added to the PM tool. In this case scenario, the sales team is updated on the status of projects but at the price of using two software applications, one to manage the sales process and another to manage the tracking of the actual work the client had requested. Additionally, there’s invoicing, one of the most important elements of this entire process as both the sales and engineering team have to be in sync in order to send the correct invoice to the customer (the price having possibly been altered during production). Invoicing usually adds an additional, and therefore third software to this entire process. Finally, the invoicing process is rarely automated, meaning that invoices are sent manually by email once they have been generated.