digitalization-guide Archives

Avoid developing your own IKEA kitchen planner

Posted by Kristoferon 2025-07-032025-07-03in digitalization-guide

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.

Read about a typical CPQ setup

Typical workflow example

Sales / partner / customer configures a L shaped kitchen section online
Sales / partner / customer press requests quote
Sales / partner / customer receives a quote request with dxf, pdf, 3D-BIM
files as attachments
Sales / partner / customer opens their favorite space planner and imports
the dxf / BIM files

See the full B2B user workflow here

How to destroy a sales configurator implementation project

Posted by Kristoferon 2024-06-142024-09-27in digitalization-guide

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.

Typical setup for Visual CPQ with Customer/Distributor Portal

Posted by Kristoferon 2024-04-272024-06-15in digitalization-guide

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.

IT Map for Manufacturing Companies

Posted by hugoon 2022-05-302024-05-02in digitalization-guide

We often get asked about the IT structure and systems needed to make product configuration and process automation happen. How are different parts connected to each other? Which departments in the company uses which systems? And how do they relate to the flow of products from purchase to delivery? Have a look at this IT map for manufacturing companies – this what we can expect to find when we look at the IT structure of a manufacturing company.

Common User Stories for B2B CPQ

Posted by Kristoferon 2021-08-262021-09-07in digitalization-guide

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.

Product Configuration Dictionary

Posted by Kristoferon 2021-08-122025-07-03in digitalization-guide

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.

Strategies for Automated Quotations in B2B CPQ

Posted by Kristoferon 2021-06-222022-04-22in digitalization-guide

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.

Migrate from Excel to a web application

Posted by Kristoferon 2021-05-162022-04-22in digitalization-guide

Many companies have a couple of Excel sheets in their organization that (when they work) really help out internal business processes. While Excel is a very powerful tool it has some weaknesses and one of them is how hard sharing is.

Building & Interior – B2B sales process

Posted by Kristoferon 2021-04-302021-09-07in digitalization-guide

As a B2B company supplying products such as windows, doors, interior or similar to larger building projects, the journey to a closed deal is long and complex, but it usually follows the same pattern. In this article, we have created a template that can help you create your own process and decide on how your digital sales tools should support it.