Design And Implementation Of Quotation System For Corrugated Products Based On Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007

Corrugators packaging enterprise is a significant stream of packaging industry in our country, and its total industrial value occupies a great proportion in the whole packaging industry, especially paper ones. As for different uses, there are a great diversity of products, with different size, appearance and properties. All these differences come from customer's special demands. Customized design and production brings a big challenge in both management and manufacture for enterprises. Quotation is briefly important to the company which is pulled by sales order. Price has to meet both market and profit. Therefore, the emergent question is how to provide quick and reasonable quotation service to customers considering product's diversity.The paper takes corrugated carton packaging business of a multinational company in China for study. Trough business analysis, it offers a cost leading pricing strategy (cost-plus pricing) to determine product price, which is mainly considered cost and other factors, like target margin, tax etc. This method requires to accurate analysis and calculation of cost. Customized products cause diverse design and routing, and it makes cost estimation more difficult. The paper starts from design analysis of carton product, establishes relationship between design features and manufacturing costs and concludes product's cost. Considering that BOM (Bill of Material) is throughout the whole life cycle of a product and will present different views (called XBOM) in different stages and can record entire product features, this paper takes evolution of BOM views in design phase as the main line, analyzes data form and extract cost related information, such as product structure, size, materials and their consumptions, routing, working hours, etc. Cost estimation process combines standard cost method with activity-based costing method, using the former to formulate the cost structure and estimate direct costs, the latter to estimate indirect costs. Direct costs related factors, such as materials consumptions, standard price, artificial man-hour and indirect cost drivers are all derived from the BOM view. According to the above ideas, this paper puts forward a a activity-based standard cost method proceeded from XBOM views, and then establish the mathematical model for cost-plus quotation.With SharePoint technology, carton quotation system is architected on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) platform and is constructed distributed site set to meet application requirements at different location. In addition, because data of product design as well as raw materials and related standard unit price are basis for calculating product cost, so database of carton quotation system synchronous obtain such data from enterprise ERP database to avoid duplicate data input. The system is driven by InfoPath form, which makes easy to d expand and maintain. InfoPath form, as function module, is embedded in SharePoint site, and interact with SQL Server database through the Web Service to present or storage cost and quotation data. As enterprise internal control requires that new products quotation sent to customers must be approved, a sequential workflow is set up in the system, including quotation application, cost estimation, quotation submit and approval. InfoPath forms collect user data and trigger workflow operation. The end of the paper gives an example to explain how to calculate cost of a product with the method and how to implement and deploy InfoPath forms and workflow.