Virtual Reality and CPQ Software

Product configuration technology is used in a variety of ways to show product variants and to select or evaluate them correctly. Product configuration is used in web applications, e.g. in online stores in the B2C area, on B2B online portals of companies, but also in offline and online sales applications in the CPQ process.

Different solution approaches have different performance characteristics with partly different suitability profiles and are often afflicted with media discontinuities.

When it comes to quoting for more complex products, such as a machine and plant system that is to be quoted based on factory layout specifications and in conjunction with a manufacturing process, sales teams want a powerful application that is more than just a product configurator.

The solutions that have existed to date lack, above all, real-time visual interaction based on ERP and CAD data. 3D visualization options are mostly rigid visualizations that are stored for specific variants.

Virtual reality configuration and quotation systems are the next-generation applications that will dominate the market within a few years.

More than technology configurators

In and of themselves, many product configurators tend to belong to the category of "process-integrated technology configurators plus finder". These do support the development of a product finder in the ERP systems of the plants and offer significantly better possibilities for sales needs than, for example, process-integrated technology configurators without a product finder.

Purely process-integrated technology configurators only make one-to-one use of the object dependencies stored in ERP systems such as ERP/EXX 6.0 or S/4, offer simple process integration in CRM or PIM (Process Integration Management) or the option of offering plausibility-checked products.

They also make it possible to carry out immediate order entry in the plants. Similarly, sales configurators, which generally use price lists as the basis for creating a configurator, offer limited options.

More than sales configurators

Although such sales configurators can be implemented relatively quickly and are sometimes an inexpensive solution, they function completely independently of the plants.

Buildability or plausibility checks (ERP recourse/connection) are hardly feasible; neither is realizing feature evaluations directly on a 3D CAD model.

SAE Sales including the SAE Interactive Motion Engine belongs to the category of process-integrated virtual and interactive product configurators with VR usage (simulations directly on the model).

They bring virtual reality into the sales process and ensure significant efficiency increases in plants with simultaneous sales growth.

At the same time, they are designed to simplify complexity while still offering, for example, quotation processes with ERP integration. Furthermore, they complement CRM systems advantageously.