Forward thinking companies are taking action by focusing on the Lead-to- Order (LTO) process - the continuous cycle that begins with recognizing a prospect and identifying needs, continues through configuring a unique product, pricing, quoting, booking an order, and ends with passing the order from sales to manufacturing and the subsequent generating of bills of material and routings for manufacturing execution.

This paper is written specifically for non-IT executives, with the following primary objectives to:

• Describe the LTO process and how software provides value to these business process improvements
• Recognize configurator software as the core supporting IT functionality
• Identify the benefits to be achieved with an improved LTO process, and also its relationship to Lean Manufacturing