Author: Kristofer

  • Avoid developing your own IKEA kitchen planner

    Avoid developing your own IKEA kitchen planner

    Most companies do not need their own IKEA kitchen planner today. Having easy to use product configurators with CAD exports on their website / customer portal / e-commerce is usually enough for most manufacturers.

    Since space planning only has few rules and can be handled by most professional design software there is little need to develop your own space planners today. Also very few manufacturers (except companies like IKEA) can handle all potential products that need to be included in a space planner, making its use very limited for planning.

    Therefore the most common product configuration setup today is having many easy to use product configurators online that can automatically export CAD files together with the quotation request. 

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  • How to destroy a sales configurator implementation project

    How to destroy a sales configurator implementation project

    Since product configuration, and many other IT-projects in manufacturing, requires lots of technical knowledge it is crucial for success to have a willing and change oriented engineering team onboard when implementing a new sales tools for quotations and configuration (CPQ).

    So if you don´t respond well to guidlines of what to do when implementing CPQ, we thought that you might enjoy the opposite approach and focus on what guarantees certain failure.

    To guarantee disaster in your sales configurator implementation project the Engineering team can do the following.

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  • Typical setup for Visual CPQ with Customer/Distributor Portal

    Typical setup for Visual CPQ with Customer/Distributor Portal

    With the rapid developments in technology these days there exists no single software solution that handles everything for a modern manufacturing company. You need to combine a few different specialized systems to achieve everything from marketing to logistics. Therefore we have provided a system overview of the typical functionalities required for a full setup of a Visual CPQ from CMS (website) to ERP. See our CPQ dictionary for abbreviations.

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  • How to handle complexity in product configuration development

    How to handle complexity in product configuration development

    Developing a product configurator can be challenging due to the many design decisions along the way. Two of the most critical aspects that impact implementation time and skill requirements are:

    • Implementation strategy for the rules in the configurator
    • Skill level of the intended user

    That is why we have put together some examples to help you determine the complexity level based on the approach you take to the configuration, and hopefully guide you in the way you tackle your development project.

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  • Project plan Template – CPQ implementation

    Project plan Template – CPQ implementation

    When creating your first product configurator that should help sales, distributors and even customers to configure products and request quotes there are many ways how to tackle the implementation project.

    We have therefore created a generic project plan to be used as a template (see below) targeted towards manufacturing companies. To avoid ending up with a long and costly IT project that isn’t used by anyone we have divided the project into a series of steps to maximize the chances of success and to get value of the implementation as soon as possible (start to use the implementation already after step 2).

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  • Separating configuration rules from inputs

    Separating configuration rules from inputs

    When working with complex configuration its usually hard to separate visible input fields and variables from hidden rules and formulas. A product expert usually relies on experience when configuring a product, instead of strict rules and formulas. But when anyone should be able to use a product configurator the complexity needs to be greatly reduced, resulting in the requirement of a limited set of easy to understand input fields and a extensive set of hidden formulas that captures all the rules.

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  • Customer journey – Questionnaire for B2B products with quotations

    Customer journey – Questionnaire for B2B products with quotations

    When working with changes in the sales process its essential to have a clear view of the customer journey. Therefore we have created a short questionnaire for some of the basic questions that the sales team should discuss and try to answer.

    This can result in a list with the typical steps to a closed deal that can be used when discussing changes.

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  • Common User Stories for B2B CPQ

    When developing new products and solutions for others its always good to have some kind of description on what the intended users might want to do with the solution. A good way to handle this is to create a list of numbered User Stories that can be referenced and used for discussion throughout the project.

    We have collected a few common user stories here that apply for online configurable products where the users should be able to customize and request quotation themselves without prior knowledge of the product.

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  • Product Configuration Dictionary

    Product Configuration Dictionary

    The field of product configuration has many tricky words and abbreviations that are hard to guess the meaning of, especially when the whole chain from client to manufacturing is digital and automated. Therefore we have created a short dictionary with some of the words we encounter daily.

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  • Strategies for Automated Quotations in B2B CPQ

    Strategies for Automated Quotations in B2B CPQ

    How should you design your digital B2B sales process for customized products in a way that is easy to use and understand for customers, and saves you time? In this post we present the most common approaches and their pros and cons so that you easily can choose how to proceed.

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