CPQ Archives - SkyMaker AB

Avoid developing your own IKEA kitchen planner

Posted by Kristoferon 2025-07-032026-01-08in 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.

Workflow with alternative to space planning in CPQ

Instead of uploading CAD content to the website / portal / CPQ the reversed workflow is the best practices solution:

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

Read about a typical CPQ setup

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.

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.

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.