Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/128820
AutoQuotes continued send quote requests and PO's. Import deviated prices, manufacturer specials, discounts and date-sensitive deals sent to you by your buying group. • My Company. Remove and restore licenses. • Permissions. Set user permissions to view and/or edit discounts, rebates, manufacturers, standard footnotes, and other company wide settings • PO History. View all PO's by project and by manufacturer over any date range. Or, view all quoting activity by manufacturer, no PO required. • Attachments for Project Management. Drag and drop emails, CAD drawings, bid documents, submittals, confirmations, quotes, PO's, invoices, progressive billing, or other files onto a project. The attachments are stored with the project online. • iPad Use. For the mobile sales force, the iPad version of AutoQuotes has all of the catalog content and the quoting capability of the desktop version. "Through AutoQuotes, we all can speak exactly the same language and access exactly the same information. It makes the process simpler, makes the process very accurate, and very efficient." Michael Posternak, PBA Reps Reps are in the information business, both to educate the channel and to deliver product information in projects from schematic design through startup. Recently, MAFSI sponsored a meeting attended by senior reps and FCSI consultants to discuss the metrics of how the distribution channel works in our industry. The start of the discussion noted that a typical major project, start to finish, requires the participation and teamwork of 25 to 30 companies—a consultant, 5-10 rep firms, 15 or more manufacturers, and a dealer. Each channel partner manages their share of the tasks—specification and design, quotes, bidding, PO's, change orders, submittals, and project management. Information technology and logistics 1 2 FEDA New s & View s have blurred the boundaries of geographic territories and have brought reps, dealers, consultants, and manufacturers into projects together all over the world. As a natural progression, there are better ways that team players can share project information online to reduce the redundancy and simplify project management.AutoQuotes works very closely with MAFSI to raise the bar for "simpler, very accurate, and very efficient." Increases in bandwidth and smarter mobile devices will continue to add speed and reduce friction through the channel. But, to continue to 'speak exactly the same language,' we need a better dictionary. There was a transitional stage right before AutoQuotes was popular for us. … Each drawing was a separate entity, each deliverable was a separate piece related to the other.AutQuotes…integrates all of our deliverables, budget, cutbooks, and specifications. If I change it in one place, everything else is changed because they are not three different documents as in the past. It is one unified system." Mark Romano, RomanoGatland Consultants and Designers AutoQuotes has always been a resource in the design community for budgeting, spec writing, and spec sheets. The application also has an import function to build AutoQuotes projects from CAD drawings that have been tagged with the KCL tagging function. The AutoQuotes CAD design department is managed by Katharine Mizla, Vice President of Design Services. Katharine has many years of foodservice design experience and now has an active following in the consultant community. She conducts weekly CAD training webinars and frequent online roundtable discussions on topics relating to CAD design and Revit industry standards. AutoCAD has been the industry standard for graphic design in foodservice for almost 30 years. However, it is still available only to specific AutoCAD trained users due to license cost, learning curve, and usability. Full AutoCAD licenses are more than $4,000 per seat. AutoCAD LT is available at a 75 percent discount, but is restricted and denied customization, simplification and database connectivity. Without programmability, AutoCAD LT 'right out of the box' is a very generic graphic design package. We believe that more consultants and more FEDA professionals should have access and success in using AutoCAD to design kitchens, so we created a version of AutoQuotes that has the built-in CAD capability of AutoCAD LT. We call it Designer.With Designer, you can create continued on page 35 AutoQuotes Training Webinars For five years, the AutoQuotes training program was a seminar on wheels, conducted in hotel rooms from city to city throughout the country. Last year, we discontinued our roadshows and began to invite users to our webinar training sessions. Webinars are free and can be attended by users at their office on their desktop PC. The end result: We now teach 500 users per month, opposed to the 500 we trained during the roadshow years. If you're interested in attending, visit our website to view our webinar training schedule. We offer four to six webinars per week and sessions include Basic, Advanced, and Admin Webinars. We also do training on the AutoQuotes iPad App, Designer, CAD and Revit. All of our webinars include the latest features in AQ360, Designer, and the AQ iPad App. Visit our website, http://www.aqnet.com/webinars.html, to sign up for an upcoming free webinar. We look forward to connecting with you soon.