Sector Roof safety, solar systems
Company CW Lundberg Industri AB
Employees 70
Major challenges
- High complexity in dimensioning and optimizations
- Design a simple and user-friendly interface for multiple customer groups
- Find a software that CWL are able to handle in-house
CEO at CWL
Thomas Lundberg
"Helping customers finding the optimal configuration for our roof safety or solar products is a key part of CWL's value proposition. With Combinum CPQ, we can provide a simple and accessible user experience for the customers. At the same time, we can manage product complexity and calculations using mostly in house resources, allowing us to act on the market requirements in a more agile and cost efficient way than before."
The company
CWL
CWL is Sweden's leading manufacturer of roof safety systems with more than 30 years of experience. The company has a high development focus and continuously improves its products based on customer benefit and safety as well as from an environmental perspective.
CWL's headquarters are located in Mora, Sweden, with additional sales and warehouse hubs in Norway and Poland. CWL provides complete solutions for roof safety and solar systems and prides themselves on having the whole value chain in house, from product development to manufacturing to sales.
The project
Challenges
During development of a complete roof mounting system for solar panels, the need for a configuration software was identified at an early stage. It was clear that the current in-house solution would not be capable of making the complex load calculations that are involved in solar mounting systems that was needed.
The requirements on the configuration software was that it, besides being able to handle complex calculations, should have a user friendly user interface for the customers and that it should be able to be developed and customized mainly by CWL engineers after initial set up.
In addition to handling complex calculations and configurations, the configuration software also had to be able to embed the current eco system of technical documentation, such as data sheets and assembly instructions, related to CWL products into bespoke custom reports based on the customers current configuration parameters.
The project
Solutions
The choice to base the system on Combinum CPQ was made after a market survey carried out by a consulting company which brought some options to the table. Combinum was able to present a solution with a project plan and a customized demo within two weeks of the first contact, and collaboration started to create the software solution.
The user is led through the configuration process by the user interface, entering geographical location, environmental parameters and information about the building.
Configuration is made easy for the customer by getting snow and wind loads automatically based on the specified address and providing a Google maps image of the roof. Furthermore, the user is given useful tips for e.g. environment parameters with icons.
After providing the external conditions, the user can create multiple roof sides and place solar panels on them. The solar panels are drawn on top of the Google image of the roof in a graphical user interface. Feedback is given instantly, with load calculations running in real time as the user inputs data, allowing the user to achieve an optimal system for their roof.
To achieve the complex load calculations, Combinum's built-in C# editor has been used to extend the functionality of the standard configurator logic with optimized functions.