Sector Lifts and elevators
Company Aritco Lift AB
Employees 100-200
Main challenges
- Large reseller network (outnumbering the employees)
- Complex products with child configurations
- Sales managers should be allowed to select the production week
- An installation drawing is needed for every lift, but depends on options
CIO / CDO at Aritco Lift AB
Klas Dybäck
Aritco has used Combinum CPQ for many years to offer our hundreds of resellers around the world the ability to customize each individual elevator. Even though the products are complex and can be manufactured in millions of different combinations, it is incredibly important for us to have a simple and user-friendly interface for the retailer.
With Combinum, our dealers can get a quote with a correct price and an associated drawing within a few minutes, this is incredibly appreciated.
Combinum CPQ is also integrated with Aritco's business system, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, which means that all orders created in the system are automatically transferred to Dynamics NAV without any manual operations. The integration is also built in the opposite direction, which enables Combinum to present information in real time, such as order status and available production opportunities from the business system.
The company
Aritco
Aritco designs and manufactures lifts based on the simple idea of improving accessibility for everyone, with a focus on Scandinavian design, smart functionality and safety.
Founded in 1995, its lifts have been installed in more than 35,000 schools, public buildings, offices, retail stores and private homes around the world.
Aritco is revolutionizing the lift industry with an award-winning mix of efficiency and aesthetics. In 2016, it launched the all-new Aritco HomeLift, winning the Red Dot Product Award 2017. The Aritco HomeLift continued to win several design awards around the world.
The project
Challenges
The large number of resellers required a system which was easy to learn and use. Earlier experience from a sequential configurator showed the importance of being able to make the selections in any order.
Many options are common for the complete lift, but every floor, door and glass section needs to be configured individually. The locations of the doors and glass sections needed to be checked to avoid collisions.
A drawing should be generated automatically based on the choices made in the configurator.
The orders should be placed through the CPQ system meanwhile allowing the sales managers to pick an available production week.
The project
Solutions
The configuration starts at the lift level. Child configurations for floors, doors and glass sections are created automatically based on the choices made in the parent configuration. Parameter values like chosen power supply, are inherited from the lift level down to the child configurations and participate in their rule set.
Collision controls are done continuously for all doors and glass sections. If two doors or glass sections overlap each other or if the top edge on a door goes outside the top of the lift shaft an error message is shown and the quote can’t be approved.
A drawing is created dynamically, by the module Combinum Graphics, while the user configures the lift. The drawing is shown in the browser and can be downloaded in the formats SVG, DXF, PNG and PDF. The drawing is also attached in the automatic order acknowledgement that is sent by email. Another area of use for Combinum Graphics is to display the color for the chosen RAL code.
When the user places an order for a lift in Combinum an order is also automatically created in the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics NAV with associated order data. During order planning the lift configuration with selected options is retrieved from Combinum to generate a Bill of Materials in Dynamics NAV.
The user accounts in Combinum and in Microsoft CRM are synchronized both ways through an integration built with web services on top of each system. This means e.g. that if a user changes his password in one of the systems it will change the password in the other system as well.