Paragon Laboratories develops, manufactures and packages pharmaceutical grade vitamins and supplements for its clients. Paragon formulates compounds and creates products in a variety of shapes, sizes and types.
Challenge: Managing Complex Quotes with Excel Spreadsheets
Clients request quotes from Paragon Laboratories that may include tasks from pre-production work to manufacturing and packaging. Variables may include compounds, casings, weights, packaging, destinations and other criteria that often require input from many members of the Paragon team.
Sales teams, formulators and reviewers were all being asked to interact with one another through a spreadsheet system. While spreadsheets can be easy to use, they introduce issues with version control when employed in a multi-user environment. Tracking a quote through the process was becoming increasingly problematic, too. Paragon developed its own spreadsheet tracker to curtail these issues, but the volume of quote requests was overwhelming the system and its users.
Solution: Custom Spreadsheet Tracking System
R.B. Zack & Associates analyzed Paragon’s requirements and examined the current spreadsheet tracking system. Then the RBZ&A team built a custom application that would track the quote from sales, to formulation, to review and finally to purchasing. Workflow functionality now allows all members of the team to see the most current version of the quote and to determine if it is progressing or if bottlenecks have occurred.