Would you like a smoother process for managing project proposals and contracts? With Project Operations, you get a seamless process across sales, project management, and finance.

Watch the webinar recording here:

You can read the video transcript here:

How to create a project contract in Project Operations?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Hi. As a salesperson, have you ever worked on project sales and found yourself almost having to guess what the project manager has estimated and planned? Do you find it difficult to align the proposal with the delivery plan? A lack of communication or poor communication between the sales and delivery departments can create confusion in customer interactions.

And that can cost the company both time and money. So how do you create a good project contract? In today’s webinar, we’ll show you how Project Operations can give you a more streamlined and efficient process, from quote to finalized project contract. You’ll see how to generate accurate quotes, retrieve relevant estimates, and automatically convert them into project contracts that everyone can easily understand and use.

Keep watching to see how this process works in practice

Frode Stenstrøm: Fun!

How do you create quotes in Project Operations?

Frode Stenstrøm: Welcome back to the broadcast, everyone. After our beloved PowerPoint countdown stopped after a few minutes, at least the rest of the broadcast should run smoothly. Today, we're excited to show you how we create quotes, and it's quite an interesting topic.

Because when you're producing proposals as part of selling projects, there is a great deal of interaction between the project department and the sales department. And I know you've prepared to demonstrate that, Merete. It's not that easy to demonstrate, because quite a few roles are involved.

Extensive. So today, as we say in the kitchen, we've cheated a little by preparing a lot of things in advance, so we can try to jump back and forth. During today's session, I'll be playing the role of project manager, and you'll be the salesperson. That way, we'll be able to demonstrate this. For those of you who don't know who you are, you've joined us a few times before.

Who are you, Merete?

Merete Falck Erichsen: I’m still Merete Falck Erichsen, a functional consultant here at ProsessPilotene. I’ve still been working here for four and a half years.

Frode Stenstrøm: 4.5 years. It’s like when you’re a child and count 4.5, then it becomes 5, and then 5.5. I’m counting 10 years now. My name is Frode Stenstrøm, and I’ll be hosting today’s broadcast and acting as a project manager working with Merete to show you how to use Project Operations to create good proposals for your customers, as well as lots of good project contracts.

So, we're on that topic now, Merete, and we've had a few broadcasts before where you've shown some of this. What have you shown previously?

Today's agenda

Merete Falck Erichsen: In the first episode, we gave a general introduction to Project Operations and an overview of it. Then, in the previous episode, we estimated a project, and today we will use that as the basis for creating quotes and contracts.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So that's why we had to estimate it first, so that we could sell it today.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly. And if you look at our YouTube channel, the first broadcast you took part in was about showing what Project Operations is and the methods that are often involved when working on a project, including planning, execution, and completion, as well as the sales department's role, where they receive a request for a project, send the proposal back and forth, make revisions, and hopefully end up with a contract with the customer.

And today’s webinar is really about the final part—the sales process—which we’ll be exploring, and it builds on that. Both of the previous broadcasts are available on YouTube, and we can see that they’ve become very popular videos, so feel free to watch them. Then you’ll have something to watch as an alternative to, well, Christmas shows, Advent calendars, and broadcasts of Three Wishes for Cinderella, yes.

We're actually better, and even the colors today are a little nicer. A little about today's broadcast, as usual: we're live on YouTube, so every mistake we make is recorded forever. It's an interactive broadcast, so if you have any questions along the way, please ask them so we can answer them. Feel free to say hello and tell us who you are, so we can have a bit of dialogue throughout the broadcast.

And we add subtitles and chapters so that you can access all the information. Ultimately, this is also available on our website, prosesspilotene.no, and our YouTube channel. We would also like to remind you about our podcast, Prosesspodden. There, we have interviewed quite a few people who explore the strategic aspects. While we often showcase products in our webinars, you will find recordings that look at how they are used in practice and the challenges our customers and partners face in their day-to-day work on business development.

And then we should be able to switch over, if I ... and then we'll talk a little about today's agenda.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Today, we will show you how to generate a project quote, how to retrieve the SMs I created last week, and how to revise the quote. The quote can either have a fixed price or be based on time and materials.

And finally, we'll show how to actually generate a project contract from that quote.

Frode Stenstrøm: Wonderful. And that brings us to the topic of project sales.

Merete Falck Erichsen: It’s a bit like regular sales, but this time, what you’re selling is an estimate of your work.

Frode Stenstrøm: And there won't be much of a PowerPoint presentation today, as far as I know.

It’s really a question of how. Shall we just talk a little about the process of getting from what we’re actually going to do to achieving our goal?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes. We have shown this a few times before, but Product Operations supports two of a company's workflows. We will look at the sales process, which is the one we will demonstrate today, where you can go from a lead to a sales opportunity, then generate a quote and create a project contract.

That is the process we will demonstrate today. Project Operation also supports the other process, which is a company's delivery process. That was the process we mainly covered last time, from idea to planning. So today, as we are in the middle of that delivery process—the quotation stage—there will probably be another video later on covering delivery and project completion.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, we are planning to have one more broadcast before Christmas. It will probably cover execution and how to use tools in practical project work. What is interesting about Project Operations is that it supports real life. A lot of IT software becomes too academic and too theoretical. But when we use these tools ourselves, we also find that it is usually a project department or delivery department that creates the project plan, communicates with the customer, and establishes a solid plan and a good foundation.

And then there is a sales department that handles the contractual and commercial aspects of that work. And the fact that the two can work in parallel and interact with each other at clearly defined points is, in my opinion, an area where this tool works very, very well.

Merete Falck Erichsen: That’s what we’re going to show today.

Frode Stenstrøm: And as usual, we use Miljøpilotene, a kind of demonstration company, so we are always Miljøpilotene FS, our fictitious form of enterprise, which is an innovation-based company with a sustainability focus in

That got a bit tangled... With a focus on environmentally friendly innovation and sustainable technology. And they also work with a lot of different things. This is a company we have created to showcase all the capabilities of the Dynamics platform, and today the focus is on projects and project sales.

And we have two roles today, Merete?

Merete Falck Erichsen: So I have a project manager who works in Project Operations, and I’m going to be a salesperson. So I’ve given you the role of project manager now—you’re Magnus, and I’m Erik.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly. And we have done that precisely to demonstrate this interactivity. Because in real life, much of the communication between a sales department and a project department often takes place on Teams or in meetings. So in today's broadcast, whenever you, as the salesperson, have a question, I, as the project manager, will hopefully provide some sensible answers so that we can demonstrate how things actually work.

And now I hope we can take a look at how your PC is doing—is it up and running now, do you think? Yes, hopefully. Otherwise, you'll have to unplug the cable and plug it back in. It could be that it's... Sometimes screen sharing can be a little slow.

There it is.

Merete Falck Erichsen: There, it’s in place.

Frode Stenstrøm: So I need to get that in full screen, and then I need to do this and that. Yes, that's right. Where do we start again?

Demo: How to generate project proposals?

Merete Falck Erichsen: So today, we thought we'd start with a lead. Because quite often, that's where you start. You don't have to start there. You can start directly with an opportunity, but I thought we'd just start with a lead.

You can already see that I've cheated a little, because this has already been qualified. And this looks very similar. If you've watched Stig or Edward's video about sales, this will look very familiar.

Frode Stenstrøm: And I’d just like to add that when you think about how a project comes about, it usually happens in one of two ways, in my view.

One possibility is that you discover a need for something—an idea or something like that that comes from within the organization—and then the organization might talk to its regular suppliers, and that’s how you get involved. Other times, you come in through a straightforward sales process—as you say, a prospect or a lead, right?

Merete Falck Erichsen: And it could come from marketing; you might have a web form that generates a lead because someone has said, oh, you're an interesting company, and I might want to buy services from you.

Frode Stenstrøm: And the great thing about it is that it doesn't really matter how the need for the project arises. But in terms of the process, it can either start with a project idea and the creation of a new project with the status "Idea," as we showed in the previous episode.

Or as you showed today, the sales process. Now it is the sales team doing the work, and they get the lead for a project. And then Guru Haugland will have a few things to say.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, she wants ISO 14000 certification. And you might think that this would come before the project plan we created last time was generated, but for the demo to work, we have already created the project plan.

It's a little difficult to do everything in such a short time.

Frode Stenstrøm: But the key point, at least, is that a salesperson will click Register Lead in the menu on the left there, and then... And fill out the form. And as you say, it could just as easily come from a customer journey in marketing communications, or the salesperson could fill it out manually.

Merete Falck Erichsen: It's very standard in that you have a lead, and the only difference is that this is work-based, not product-based as in regular sales.

But otherwise, it is exactly the same, and then you have to qualify it. I have already qualified it, so that button is not shown here. But once you qualify it, you move on to creating a sales opportunity.

And again, this looks quite similar to how it does in Sales. The contact is automatically created if you do not already have it when you qualify the lead, and the same applies to the account. There is a little more focus on me, Erik, being the account manager and which entity you are actually selling to.

You can also have delivery between departments within a company in Project Operations. But other than that, it is quite similar to regular sales.

Frode Stenstrøm: And that's the great thing—there's really nothing new about it if you're already used to working with Sales and having a lead and an opportunity. You qualify the leads you think you might be able to sell something to as opportunities, so it's the same.

But as you point out, this now also supports different corporate groups and group divisions with departmental deliveries. Here too, Asker is listed as the contracting entity responsible for delivery. So yes, much of it is the same.

How to retrieve estimates

Merete Falck Erichsen: So here you can add the opportunity line, and you can't retrieve the estimates from a project there, but you can enter, say, okay, I think it will take x number of hours at a given hourly rate, as well as the various products you might need.

In that sense, the opportunity table is quite similar, but things start to differ when we begin creating a quote. That’s what I thought we’d spend most of our time on today.

Frode Stenstrøm: In traditional quotation processes, you have a quotation and an order. But in the project world, we call them a project quotation and a project order.

And in English, they are called “project quote” and “project order.” They are essentially a quote and an order, but they contain much more relevant data, which is what you’re showing.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so I'll show you now. Here, I've already started creating a quote. What's interesting here is that I've created a time-and-materials-only quote, which means there is no fixed price.

And here it starts to look quite different from what you would expect in regular sales.

Frode Stenstrøm: Where you might, in a way, write five apples and two pears and a car, and then ...

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and in the summary section for regular sales, the products are the main focus. Here, I have a lot more tabs and much more information, and it looks completely different from regular sales.

Again, we use completely standard screens and products; we haven't made any changes.

Frode Stenstrøm: Customizations, really?

Merete Falck Erichsen: No, so you can do that if you want the product tab in the middle, like you have in standard sales.

We use it completely as standard. But again, you have a contract unit, you have a price list for products only, and there is also a little more focus on whether there is a limit that must not be exceeded.

Especially when you have time-and-materials quotes, this is quite important. Is there a point where you simply cannot exceed a certain amount?

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, the customer’s absolute budget, for example.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And again, you can see that there are quite a few different tabs, and another new feature is that you have quote lines.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, what is that?

Merete Falck Erichsen: That’s where you actually get your estimates from.

Frode Stenstrøm: From the project?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: Okay.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So here you can see that in regular sales, there is a quote line, which is simply where you add this product, or you can also specify how many hours you want to offer, and that is one line. But here I have a lot of information about what exactly I should include on the line.

Because here I’ve linked it to a project, which means that a quote can be linked to multiple projects, but a project can only be included in one quote.

Frode Stenstrøm: So a project can have a

Merete Falck Erichsen: offer,

Frode Stenstrøm: while a quote can cover several projects as a whole?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes.

So here, this means that this particular project is based on time and materials. And now I have specified that I want to include all the project tasks from the project I have linked to.

And it’s fetching all these tasks that takes a little time, which is why I’ve cheated a bit. Here I also have a given set of roles, and I’ve simply said that all the roles are billable, meaning that all the roles, in a sense, cost the customer money. But here you could say that, okay, perhaps the project manager is just keeping an eye on things.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, but that happens quite often. It’s quite common to have someone who is commercially responsible for the project and is part of the project, but whose time should not be billed to the customer because, for example, they are a sales resource.

So here you can group those roles.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, but you need to know how much time they have available, how much time they need to devote to the project, and what tasks they have.

Today, the customer focuses on time, but if Transactions are also to be included, you can also have billable categories.

Frode Stenstrøm: What would be an example of a transaction?

Merete Falck Erichsen: It could be a travel expense claim.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So you’re saying that, okay, this project also includes expenses such as travel. Or other things.

Frode Stenstrøm: And another nice thing about this is that you actually add it to the quote line, so you can say, for example, that for project A, travel expenses are covered, while for quote B they are not, or, well, that sort of thing.

Merete Falck Erichsen: now I have to find—now all my lines have disappeared, have

Frode Stenstrøm: Have they?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, I can't see where it's gone now

Frode Stenstrøm: quote line details

Merete Falck Erichsen: put in a separate tab, yes. That's what happens when you

Frode Stenstrøm: No, they’re there, they are

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, but it looked very different then. But yes, it looks pretty similar. Anyway, what I did was click “Import from project estimate.” And since I had checked all the tasks, when I click it, all the tasks will appear within a minute or two—which feels a bit longer when you’re live on YouTube.

So if you go back and check, all of these tasks will be the tasks that I had.

Frode Stenstrøm: In the project plan?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, like the one I made for the previous broadcast.

Review and activation of the offer

Frode Stenstrøm: The great thing about this is that you often create multiple quote revisions. This allows you to create several revisions of a quote and retrieve the latest line items. I think that is very efficient, because what often happens when a project manager has finished preparing the quote is that the sales team then has to step in and create a quote letter. Retrieving all the details from the project involves quite a lot of work, and mistakes can easily occur. A lot of time is also spent on quality assurance, especially in large projects.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So if we now go back to our quote

then it’s always a good idea to activate the offer once you’ve received the plan and are ready to send it.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Because then you lock in that offer. Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: Then you have a revision idea that is zero, because it is the first one, and then you can create a new one, right?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, because then I can click revise, and that creates the first version I had.

Version 0 is then saved, and I can revise it to create a new version.

Frode Stenstrøm: This gives you, as a salesperson, incredibly good documentation of how the quote has changed and what was changed over time. It is not always easy to see in a very large project if small details in the project are changed that may be very important to the customer,

so some things get lost.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and since I had quite a lot of lines here, it’s a little difficult to see the difference between revision 0 and revision 1, but at least this way I include all the lines, so that the quote is correct, and the total amount comes directly from the quote. So I didn’t enter this amount myself; it comes from the lines retrieved from the estimate.

Frode Stenstrøm: But let me ask you, Merete: perhaps you don't want all the quote lines included in your quote. How do you do that?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Well, let's see, I've added that too. Because that was exactly what came next—that, yes, this was just the project showing that these are the tasks. But that was the point: suppose I now say that I don't want all the lines, then I can first message Magnus and say that the customer doesn't want all the lines.

And now I can include...

Frode Stenstrøm: The project manager, yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And it is linked to the sales opportunity.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: For this customer, I don't want to include all the lines, such as time and materials.

Frode Stenstrøm: The customer is often most interested in the big picture, perhaps the milestone plan and level 1 of the project plan, or maybe even level 2.

Merete Falck Erichsen: But you can also split it up, since not everyone is involved in changes.

Because you can also...

Frode Stenstrøm: Then I got a message here on Teams.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And now you can see that it also follows along...

Frode Stenstrøm: The plan itself

Merete Falck Erichsen: This is the topic, so this is the sales opportunity. So now Magnus can say that this sales opportunity is what Erik is asking him about.

Frode Stenstrøm: Then I'll answer Merete on this. What's quite nice here is that you didn't have to leave the experience you were in. You were working as a salesperson on bids and bid preparation, and you can ask the project department questions. In this case, Magnus is the project manager, so Magnus answers.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Now come the question marks, but it is

Frode Stenstrøm: It became ... Now you can even get ... I can even add a little smiley here for you, there you go.

Merete Falck Erichsen: The quote, like that, and now I would normally have gone back and actually revised the quote, but again, precisely because retrieving the line and so on takes a little time, I’ve cheated a little this time,

because ...

Frode Stenstrøm: And that's not so surprising, because you actually have to summarize what may be a project plan with thousands of lines that need to be included in a proposal.

It takes a few minutes to process that.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so the next thing Erik thought the customer would want was for the project to extend a little further into the future. So, the tasks are the same, but they think they may need to start a little later. Because one of the nice things about Project Operations is that you can have two price lists, so you get one price for, say, 2025, as I have done here, and another price for 2026.

Frode Stenstrøm: And that’s a great feature, because when most projects span calendar years, they are adjusted in line with the consumer price index. Being able to include that in the quote so it’s correct from the outset may not sound like much, but it can amount to many thousands of kroner.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and now I have a fairly small adjustment from one year to the next, but the price has changed.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly.

So then you've just entered two different price lists.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so the quote and everything looks very similar. The details now look the way they usually do, like this. They are exactly the same. But if I now go ... to this page and group by role, you can see that this task in 26 costs 60 kroner more than this task in 25 because I have different price lists.

Frode Stenstrøm: I think this is absolutely magical. We have just submitted a major proposal ourselves, and we prepared the basis in Project Operations, which saves so much time, especially if you make a small adjustment to the basis. And then you have to recalculate the project?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, because what I did here was change the project start date, add a price list, and retrieve the lines.

That's all I've done.

Frode Stenstrøm: And then you can immediately see how much the analyst is supposed to work, how much the solution lead is supposed to work. It's all laid out clearly, grouped by role.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and there are also various tools that can extract all of this in a way and put it into a document that the customer can receive if you want to generate documents.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, great. So the trick here was to enter two different price lists and specify that they are valid from one date to another.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so this is how it works. In the quote, I have different project price lists.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And here I said that it started in 24, because my project only started in 24, but it was in 25.

And throughout 2026, I have a new price list.

Frode Stenstrøm: And then all you have to do is click a link to the new price list, so is it really that simple?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, I just thought I’d quickly show you ... Look, there was the project again. Here, I can also just click on it. Then I can copy a price list.

So if I copy it, it's also very easy to adjust the price using, for example, the index.

So if I now just say that I’m copying it. Save it. And then we go to role pricing. This is a new feature you get with Project Operations, because it’s not that common in regular sales. But you can update the price, and price adjustments, as you say, are often a...

Frode Stenstrøm: 3%, then. Or I think I heard that the consumer price index in Norway ended up at 2.6% for, well, the past year, 2024.

Yes. This really saves time.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And if I have new role prices, I can add them to my quote for another year.

Time and materials pricing

Frode Stenstrøm: But this is a price list for the roles in the project; we have simply done the same with materials and other things.

Merete Falck Erichsen: But again, my focus so far has been on the roles, but I do have material prices

as a separate tab.

Frode Stenstrøm: If you sold projects, construction projects, or that sort of thing.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So I have some products here, and I can update their prices too.

Frode Stenstrøm: In the same way, yes.

It wasn't particularly complicated, and then you can see the category and district category prices,

What would you say the category prizes are, then?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Then it'll be the same—are you including that?

Frode Stenstrøm: transactions and stuff

Merete Falck Erichsen: So then you need to define which transactions you are actually dealing with, and then you can get different price adjustments based on the transaction categories you have.

Frode Stenstrøm: So if you're not interested in pricing your roles, can you price based on transactions instead?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Mm, with markups and such. But today, we've mostly opted for role-based pricing, as it's a little easier to demonstrate very concretely. It says that this is the team price.

Frode Stenstrøm: It’s very often junior, senior; there may be subject-matter experts, which is actually quite relevant.

Merete Falck Erichsen: But then you could have set them up as different roles. It’s very similar to how I could have had senior, analyst, and junior roles, with different rates for each.

And as long as I assign tasks to them, I’ll get the final prices in the quote.

Frode Stenstrøm: But then, if we look back at the quote, just to do a quick recap.

So, if we start by looking at the quote analysis, we have created a quote, added the lines from the project, created a revision of the quote by clicking Save and activate new, and made price adjustments and that sort of thing.

Merete Falck Erichsen: It even has a profitability analysis. Because you can have both cost and sales price lists. So as long as I have now entered the cost price for all the roles in Miljøpilotene, it indicates whether the project is profitable.

Frode Stenstrøm: And during which period it is profitable.

Because it doesn't necessarily have to be the same. Okay.

Fixed price in a project proposal

Frode Stenstrøm: What was the next thing you thought about?

Merete Falck Erichsen: No, the next thing was to show that, for now, I have only had time and material for both of them,

in the quote. But I don't necessarily need to have that. The customer might come back and say, okay, I don't want to pay for everything on a time-and-materials basis; I want some of it at a fixed price.

Frode Stenstrøm: Okay.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Because that's also possible. So, if we go back here, I can communicate with Magnus again and say that the customer wants

Something at a fixed price, because they want a little more predictability. If they want a little predictability, we can offer something at a fixed price.

And I believe Magnus has most of it at a fixed price, but some of the project management was billed on a time-and-materials basis. Because it is often difficult to know what

Frode Stenstrøm: I’m saying that we also need to include some milestones in the plan, because you can tie payments to milestones, as far as I know. But, yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: If we then move on and look at the quote again, because now I have a quote, if I just look in here, I now have an item that is fixed-price,

and one that is time and materials.

So for this part, it is quite predictable for the customer, since they will get it at a fixed price. But we also have a part where it is very convenient for us as suppliers not to have a fixed price. Otherwise, it is quite similar. But if we go into one of them, I am now looking at the fixed-price option.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, first of all, there were those two lines, and now you've only opened one of them, which takes you to the fixed-price description.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And this time, I have only selected project tasks. So she had all of them, but now she has selected only some. And again, you have the same options for tasks and roles, but now she has a separate one for billable tasks.

So here I can either specify which tasks from the project I want, or I can go into the project and select all the tasks I want to bring in here.

And the last one is the easiest. For example, I could ask Magnus: Can you just tell me which tasks have a fixed price and which don't?

you could collaborate like that, but I get the same details here anyway, including the price and all that.

Frode Stenstrøm: But these are the parts of the project that have been included in the fixed-price specification.

So if you said that the first two deliverables were fixed-price and the rest were based on time and materials, you would simply select the first two or three project plans and link them to the quote. That is essentially what you have done.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so it’s actually the other way around. They get a fixed price for the final part of the project, so that’s where they start at one end, while the initial parts, which involve some project management, were not fixed-price.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly.

Project with partial invoicing and multiple payers

Merete Falck Erichsen: And what I thought I'd show you here, which is pretty cool, is that you have a customer tab.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Because they might now also say, no, but Nordic Robotics, which was the customer in this case, should only pay 70% of the price. As for the remaining 30%, someone suddenly looked for Nordic Drone, which was involved.

And then we can split it up. You can also set a not-to-exceed limit, as they may not be willing to pay more than a certain price.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And then the other party is invoiced for the remaining amount.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes. Because what happens after this is that the invoices are generated, along with the orders and the supporting documentation needed to issue them.

All of that now happens based on the information contained in the project contract.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Or these milestones

Frode Stenstrøm: as I have mentioned,.

Merete Falck Erichsen: They usually appear here, but apparently the screen is a little small. Now I have payments 1 and 2, and I have entered the rest as milestones for the fixed-price quote. So if we just take a quick look at the other one, it is back to time and materials,

only selected tasks.

If I now look at these tasks, they are, in a way, the first tasks in

my project. And they don't get those at a fixed price. Here, I could have said that Nordic Robotics should pay 100% of this one or only 70% of the other, but now I've split it between both. But you can distinguish between the time-and-materials one and the fixed-price one. That way, you can have different payment plans for the two.

Frode Stenstrøm: But what you're showing here, Merete, is that you don't have to make it so complicated. You can simply set up the project structure and contract structure that suit the customer.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So you have a great many options, which is why I’ve sort of cheated, because there are so many options. So there will be many different proposals, precisely because there are so many choices you can make.

Frode Stenstrøm: And if you're a company that never does anything other than, for example, hourly billing and keeps it simple, then we'd like to hide all the elements so that only those few options remain and there aren't so many choices to consider. But I know there's tremendous flexibility in it.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And then you would just do what I did on the first quote.

Frode Stenstrøm: And what you're showing, which is perhaps the most relevant, is that very often you might have a preliminary project at a fixed price and a main project that isn't ready yet. In Project Operations, you can then create the preliminary project as one project plan and the main project as another, and then combine them into a quote for two projects.

Merete Falck Erichsen: To demonstrate, when you create a quote, you get a tab containing the billing setup for the tasks. This is the easiest place to link the tasks to the quote. This indicates that it is linked to the quote. Here, you can either link a quote line or unlink it. It is very easy to select multiple tasks or just a couple.

And add them to that quote. Exactly,

Frode Stenstrøm: exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So this is really what the project manager sees, whereas now they see me, as Erik mentioned

the project.

And the next thing was, no, they don't want anything based on time and materials; they only want a fixed price.

That is really the other simple way to create quotes. Again, you create a quote that looks quite similar, but now we set the line items at a fixed price and include all the tasks. This also allows you to create an invoicing schedule.

Frode Stenstrøm: And just to reiterate what you have said now, you have a quote, and each individual line will essentially be a project with all its details. So in a way, it is a classic quote and order setup, with quote and order headers and order lines, except that the line is the project.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and the line-item part itself is new, because normally you're used to having a quote with a line item, whereas here you also have line-item details. So you get quite a lot extra.

Frode Stenstrøm: And since it’s almost Christmas, I’ll have a gingerbread cookie.

Merete Falck Erichsen: But here again, I’ve only specified a start date for invoicing. It then generates an invoicing schedule.

Here you can specify whether you want it to run weekly or monthly. You will then get a generated recurring milestone plan. It can only do this automatically for fixed-price projects.

And again, all the same lines are here, and I’ve simply retrieved them from the project.

Frode Stenstrøm: And if you click on it, you can retrieve it again

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: So I'm telling you now that I've re-estimated the project, or updated the project, so as the salesperson you can simply retrieve it from the project manager's project.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Then you just click on it, but again, it might take a minute, so you have time for a quick sip of coffee while you wait. But it’s much faster than doing it manually.

Frode Stenstrøm: The alternative is to open Excel and find the three lines where the project manager changed it, and then... Yes, that saves so much time, it’s incredible.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So... We have the quote, and here again it also generates some charts comparing the customer's expectations. You could say what the customer's budget is, but apparently it hasn't been entered here.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, that’s quite interesting, because suppliers will often offer more than the customer wants. There are somewhat differing interests at play here.

Review and updates to the proposal

Merete Falck Erichsen: But if we now think, okay, this is the final quote, then we need to activate it. So now we have, in a sense, sent it in some form, whether through a portal, by generating a document, or however it is done. We have now sent it, so we activate the quote to lock it. Because we want to know that this was what we sent to the customer.

Frode Stenstrøm: In the process flows, we will often create portals for you and your team, so when the quote is ready, the customer will receive a link, and we will be able to present the entire quote in a web portal, dittfilmernavn.no/quote, where the customer can view it. And if the customer is satisfied, they click Accept, and it immediately becomes a contract.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And that’s what she’s going to do now. Okay, now we’re thinking...

Frode Stenstrøm: We won that one, then—we win everything. I'm going to win everything. This one, at least.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Now they got a fixed price, after all.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, we agreed to it. Yes, okay, fine.

Merete Falck Erichsen: That was what they got.

Frode Stenstrøm: And then you just click “Close as won,” and what happens to this now?

Transition from quote to project contract

Merete Falck Erichsen: Now I’m generating the project contract.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, so the contract is generated directly from the quote.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So now I include all the line items, the price and everything like that, as well as the invoicing schedule that I already had at the quotation stage.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So now you can see why I cheated a little on the others...

Frode Stenstrøm: That takes time too. And translated into traditional sales terms, we're essentially moving from quote to order.

Now, as I said earlier, it goes from a project proposal to a project contract. Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Of course, we also have the demo specter, which takes much longer than usual.

Frode Stenstrøm: No, it always feels like a long time when you're standing there watching something that seems to take so long. In the meantime, we can remind ourselves that Christmas is just around the corner and we've bought all our Christmas presents, so it'll all work out.

Have a gingerbread cookie.

Then we can see that it's finished.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And now I can see that it was at the quotation stage—it was highlighted here—and then it moved on to the project contract. Now I just have to do this.

So, again, it actually looks quite similar to a quote, and I think that's common in sales too—very often you're like, “Oh, what happened now?” because it looks like it's in the same place.

Frode Stenstrøm: But I see it says order.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Mm, so it’s under orders. And then you can see here, contract lines—I didn’t have any products with me today.

Frode Stenstrøm: No, but you had projects, yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And these are all the same line items that I had in my quote; they are included today.

So all the tasks, roles, details here, and the invoice schedule that I had before.

Frode Stenstrøm: Has everything been copied over?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Everything was simply carried over.

But it’s not closed now, because in a project you may win the bid, but then you do a re-estimation after you’ve won.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So here too, I can still retrieve all the lines again.

Frode Stenstrøm: And edit it.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Edit it.

Frode Stenstrøm: And if there had been a change order, you could basically have added it as a new line?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, you can only have one fixed-price line for the same project in a contract and a quote. So then you just have to determine whether it is a new project or how to split it up.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: You can also add price lists here, and it is much better to add a new price list than to change the price, because that could affect hours that have already been recorded and so on.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And when you start using the contract, you will also see this here. But you can also set it up to require advance payment or fee payment.

And again, if you want more customers, you can also see that here.

Frode Stenstrøm: Who will share the costs, yes. But then you actually get a very good project contract that you can print out or display on the website?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, or linked to the project contract that Pia has already shown, to include some additional elements.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, because Pia showed a broadcast where we have added contract management to the platform. It may be that you then enter a framework agreement for the contract, which has rules in the price lists, and the projects may then be call-offs under that framework agreement.

So these things are very closely interconnected.

Merete Falck Erichsen: But if we're happy with this contract now, we just need to confirm it, because that will lock it. We can still close the contract as lost as well. But now it's locked.

Frode Stenstrøm: If you've reached the point where you say you've got the job, and then lose it afterwards, you've done a lot wrong.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, that's possible in the system.

Frode Stenstrøm: The system supports fuck-ups—that's basically what I'm trying to say. But hopefully it has started.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, but now this is locked, and that’s what we’ll show next time—that it’s locked. And when you start using the hours, it will show so you can keep track of the hours being used and so on.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, because that’s what you’ll be covering next week—namely, what happens when the project goes live. And then it’s interesting to come back to this and see what actually happened with the contract and what happened with our project. Both the sales team, which has a vested interest in seeing that the projects they have promised their customers are going well, and the project manager want to see that things are going well—and, not least, the customer wants to see that too.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: Were we finished then?

Summary and conclusion

Merete Falck Erichsen: That was really what I wanted to show you today.

Frode Stenstrøm: Really great, Merete. I think we'll see if we should turn this and that off. We've basically reached this point in the demonstration now. So I think we should briefly summarize the things we've shown. I thought I'd let you do that.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So today, I’ve shown you how to generate a quote by retrieving estimates that, for example, a project manager has already entered. Revising quotes is quite similar to what we did when we created new quotes, and you can have different types of quotes: fixed price, time and materials, or a combination.

Perhaps you need to postpone the project start, meaning you need a separate price list for the later part of the project. I also took a look at the quote budget, where you set a not-to-exceed limit and could see graphically whether you were above or below that limit. Finally, we generated a project contract.

Frode Stenstrøm: And this may seem like quite a lot, but it’s really not all that complicated. You receive an inquiry, qualify it, prepare a quote, and obtain all the data from the project manager. Today, this often happens via email, Excel spreadsheets, and lots of other unstructured communication, so this gives it structure. If the customer says they want the quote adjusted, the project manager is notified, makes the adjustment, and I can retrieve a new version.

And what I see is that almost all the projects we are involved in go through revisions of the proposal, and they keep getting better when there is good communication between the parties, until you arrive at the project basis you will be starting from. It also handles any changes that occur along the way. And everything is organized systematically, so instead of having to rely on getting hold of Pål the salesperson, Tor the salesperson, or some other salesperson, you have it all in one place.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Plus, the CFO has the underlying data in the database and can generate Power BI reports or similar based on it.

Frode Stenstrøm: And then you get something really interesting, which is this analytical perspective—how things are going—and that provides valuable insights. So when estimating a project for a customer, you become increasingly accurate, improving the quality each time.

And then it is entirely possible to display this, as I said, in customer portals or report formats or whatever, and have it signed electronically. And next week, we will show exactly that, as well as how you use the project basis to carry out the project, and then look at the interaction between sales and the project in those two phases.

And with that, Merete, I just want to say thank you so much for your contribution to today's broadcast. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below. If you found this useful, like the video and share it with someone you think would benefit from it. If you would like more professional content, subscribe to our channel and follow us on LinkedIn. You can find the broadcast on YouTube and on the website prosesspilotene.no.

The broadcast is produced by Prosesspilotene, which increases the value of your customers through the use of Microsoft technology and works with sales, service, and project management processes. Our analytics team can help you create artificial intelligence, insight analytics, and data analytics platforms. Our collaboration team can create fantastic websites, customer clubs, and customer portals—not least project portals.

Stay tuned next week, when we’ll take an even closer look at how we can work with project deliveries. I, Frode Stenstrøm, have been responsible for this episode, and the project manager is Oddbjørg Berge. Until next time, we wish everyone better work processes.

In this demo, you'll see how you can efficiently:✔ Generate project quotes by retrieving and revising estimates✔ Convert quotes into project contracts

In our live demos, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions directly and engage in live discussions with our Project Operations experts. Join us for a practical walkthrough of the process and see how Dynamics 365 Project Operations can simplify day-to-day work and collaboration for project managers and sales teams.