Pipeline Management for Engineering: Separate Technical Clearance From Commercial Approval

A capital equipment enquiry passes through at least two independent evaluations. An engineering team decides whether your offer meets the specification, and a commercial team decides whether the price, delivery and terms are acceptable within a budget that may not exist until next year.

These proceed on different timelines and fail for different reasons, yet most pipelines represent them with a single status. The result is a board full of deals marked as pending, where nobody can tell whether a drawing is awaited, a query is unanswered or a budget year has not started.

Once a customer's engineering team has accepted your offer technically in writing, the nature of the deal changes completely. Competitors who have not cleared are now at a disadvantage, and the remaining discussion is about price, delivery and terms with people you may not yet have met.

Recording that clearance as a distinct stage lets the team behave accordingly. Before it, the right response to silence is an engineer answering a question. After it, the right response is a commercial conversation with the buyer, and confusing the two wastes both.

An engineering opportunity waiting for a budget year is often described as slow, which suggests it needs more pressure. It does not. It needs a date and a review month, and until that month arrives the team should be spending its effort elsewhere.

Recording the customer's capex cycle and sanction position turns a frustrating deal into a scheduled one. It also gives the salesperson something useful to do in the meantime, which is to make sure the specification written for that budget describes equipment you can supply.

In capital equipment, the delivery period quoted is frequently the deciding factor and it is quoted months before the works has any obligation. When several such offers convert in the same period, the promise made to win the order becomes a problem for the shop floor.

Keeping quoted delivery weeks and expected purchase order months on the board makes that risk visible while it is still a forecast. Reading the order book against manufacturing capacity in the weekly review is a small discipline that prevents a specific and expensive kind of failure.

RFQs not yet quoted, technical queries outstanding, cleared offers with no commercial movement, capex-parked deals whose review month has arrived, and expected purchase orders by month against the works schedule. Half an hour, and each item leaves with either an engineer or a salesperson attached to it.

This does not design, estimate, plan production, manage drawings or track manufacturing progress. It is the commercial pipeline: enquiries, specifications, offers, clearances, orders and the dates attached to each, held where sales, engineering and the works can all read the same record.

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