Description
Key Learnings
- Discover the benefits of configuration in product development and product management.
- Learn how to solve business challenges around speed, customization, and integration with a configurator tool.
- Discover the business areas that benefit from configuration and the return on investment.
Speaker
- JTJames TennentJames Tennent is the founder and Director of Tentech. Tentech is a leading technology solutions provider specializing in advanced information management, systems integrations and automation. James has over 15 years of proven experience in advanced robotics, data management, systems integration, and automation. He is at the forefront of machine learning and advanced AI. He used this to develop a world first drawing processing tool to identify drawing features and metadata, along with converting read only drawings into usable formats. James has worked with large organizations and government departments such as power utilities, large manufacturing firms, mining and resource organizations to utilize tech innovation for business transformation. James is dedicated to enabling organizations to harness cutting-edge technologies for growth, improved efficiency, and helping them reach their business goals.
JAMES TENNENT: OK. Thanks, everyone, for joining me. My name is James, and I'm the Managing Director of Tentech. Today's topic, design deliver on demand, is going to be a deep dive into a case study that Tentech have been able to do with one of our clients on how to build a custom configurator for their product website. Just before we get started, please observe the safe harbor statement. I'm not going to pause on this for too long, but if you want to read it properly, you can just pause the video.
OK, so today's agenda. So firstly, I'm going to give you a little bit of an idea of who Tentech are and what we do if you haven't heard of us before. Then, we'll dive straight into the case study. So after the case study, we'll talk about how we solved the particular client's issues. And I'll be showing you a live demonstration of not specifically the case study itself, but a similar product just to show you how quickly and easily we can get up and running with configuration.
And finally, we'll be talking about the results of that case study and how we were able to improve in ROI and really get a lot of benefit to the client. So firstly, Tentech. So we are a software company. We build a software platform called MinuteView. And we also deliver technical services. Tentech have been around for over a decade now. And we've worked with all of Australia's biggest companies and some of the world's biggest companies as well.
We specialize in system integration, artificial intelligence. In fact, we've been working in artificial intelligence since long before the advent of ChatGPT and things like that. We've worked on advanced vision and those sort of things for some of our clients as well. But really, the heart of our services and our software are in the automation and the information management space.
So that automation piece really fits really quite nicely amongst the system integration piece as well, where we were able to automate the integration of systems irrelevant of what the system is. So it might be you've got an Autodesk Vault and you've got an Autodesk Construction Cloud and SAP, a CRM, Salesforce, or Dynamics 365. The automation and the integration of all of these systems together is where Tentech really excel.
And all of these integrations are sitting on top of our platform MinuteView. As I mentioned, we work with Australia's biggest companies. That includes practically all of the utility companies in Australia. And that's energy, waste water, also telecommunications. We also work with most of the mining companies in Australia as well. We work with some of Australia's biggest manufacturers, including government, so Department of Defense, BAE Systems, and those sorts of things as well.
So we are very, very used to working with the biggest people in town. And every one of these customers uses our software, MinuteView. The nice part about having these very, very large companies utilizing your software is that the software gets stress tested in the most brutal scenario possible. So we are now able to say very, very confidently that our software works perfectly in the biggest companies, in the most stressful environments that a software can possibly run in.
So today's topic, essentially, is the problem statement, which is, does your product range involve customization, yet the process of configuring products is a manual process with significant time, effort, and resources involved. This is the problem that we'll be talking about today. And this problem is solved by the implementation of a product configurator.
Now, you may not have heard of what a configurator is, but you almost certainly will have worked with one in the past. The big companies, like your automotive companies and your larger companies like Nike, these type of companies are typically the companies that implement configurators, because historically, configurators have only really been accessible to the top end of town. And that's the part that's really changing now with the implementation of Minute Configurator.
A configurator is typically hosted on a website. An example of this would be if you navigate to the Tesla website, or any other automotive website, you can navigate through and select different colors. You can really configure your product. And what that does, and the reason why we want to be able to configure your own product is so that the customer, the user of the website, really becomes emotionally invested in the purchase of your product.
You can imagine that if someone's purchasing $100,000 car, they really want to see what it's going to look like in the color that they want to choose. They also want to see what it's going to look like with the options that they select. So by giving them the configurator and giving them an option to look at the product before they purchase it really gets them halfway there to the purchase straight away. Other companies, like Nike, are using it to configure shoes and some of their other products as well, and again, really driving that customer engagement.
If your customer is configuring their own product, they're much more likely to follow through with the purchase later on. So this is what a configurator is. Now, let's start by having a look at a case study where Tentech was able to implement a configurator for one of our clients. The client we're going to talk about today is called PierLite. This is an Australian lighting company. In fact, this was one of Australia's largest lighting companies, and have done so many revolutionary things that recently they've actually been purchased, bought out by a global lighting company called Signify, which is a huge, huge deal.
And we will talk about that a little bit later on as well. But when we first engaged with PierLite, they gave us a very ambitious vision for what they wanted from a configurator. They said that they needed, their vision was, to supply a bill of material quantities of customized product solutions designed by the customers in real time and manufactured within weeks. So it's an extremely ambitious vision that they gave us that we were able to deliver for them.
They needed to reduce lead time and provide supply, predictability, more choice of personalization for customers. And again, this really goes back to what we were talking about before of really making sure that the customer is emotionally connected with your product. They also needed to implement design compliance. So there's no point in giving people the ability to configure anything they want if it's not possible for us to manufacture or produce the product that they configure.
So we need to add rules around it so that we are in compliance and we don't need to do custom engineering every time we make a configuration. We also needed to provide on the website real-time product information. Now, this could be technical specifications. It could be pricing. And more specifically, they need delivery dates. In lighting companies, obviously, when you're working with architects and people, they will need to know when the delivery time is so that they can manage their projects accordingly.
And finally, we had to implement automation and system integration so that we could stamp out all of the middlemen that were essentially slowing the process down from start to finish. The challenge of configurators is a really interesting one, actually. And it just comes down to math in reality. So if we take the example of Tesla, for example, you can see on the screenshot we have a screenshot of the configurator in the Tesla website.
You can see there are six colors. Now, the color parameter is what I'm going to be referring to through the conversation as a parameter. And there are six options or color options for that parameter. Same thing goes with the wheels. There are two wheel options for the wheel parameter. So essentially what that means is for Tesla to be able to manage who's buying what and those sort of things, they need to be able to manage 12 different possible outcomes for this particular brand or this particular product.
So six colors times two different wheel types is going to give you 12 permutations of this product. This is a simple one. And this is a very, very straightforward example. 12 possibilities for a particular product is very, very easily achieved. It gets more challenging, though, the more parameters and the more options you add. In fact, the number of permutations starts to grow exponentially. So in another example, you might have a parameter of color with 20 options.
You might have 10 material options, and you might have 10 attachment options. Now, we're talking about a situation where we've got 2,000 possibilities. And in addition to that, what typically happens in configurators is that, yes, it's possible to choose any one of the 2,000 possible permutations of a product, but the chances of your customers choosing all of them is very, very rare. In fact, most of the time, with 2,000 possibilities, you might actually only sell 100 different configurations.
So you've now got 1,900 permutations of data loaded into your CRM, loaded into your ERP system or whatever it is. All of that data is sitting there waiting for someone to purchase but will never actually purchase that particular product configuration. So we typically go through this process. In fact, most of the big companies will go through this process, this configuration process, using what's called an exhaustive method.
The exhaustive method means that you would go through every possible configuration. You would render the image of what that configuration looks like. You would generate data sheets. You would generate bill of materials. You would generate all of the engineering specs. You would probably upload all of the different permutations into your CRM system for purchasing into your ERP system, for building materials, control, all of these different things.
You'd be loading it all in there. And for a lot of you, and in fact, a lot of customers, they're paying these enterprise systems, like SAP and CRM, they're paying based on the amount of data you're using in the systems. So loading 2,000 permutations into the system with bill of materials and tech sheets and everything is just a huge waste of data in these systems. And you end up paying for a bunch of data that you never use.
So the exhaustive method is good and does work. But it's usually just reserved for those the top end of town where they're not too worried about the amount of data used and those sort of things. The other option, that MinuteView, the platform, leverages is an on-demand process. So instead of pre-loading and pre-calculating and prerendering all of the permutations available, we render them and we create them on-demand, which is a much, much more efficient way of doing it.
And you'll see from the live demo that I'm going to do, it's not making any sacrifices in speed or anything. Going a little bit further into what PierLite, the company, were asking us to do, this particular lighting module that they wanted us to do-- we spoke earlier about how many parameters and the number of parameters growing the number of permutations exponentially. Well, the challenge that they gave us was they needed a product with 19 configurable parameters with varying number of options under each parameter.
This resulted in a possible number of configurations of more than 20 million. So the pre-loading and the pre-calculation and the prerendering is just, at this point, it's not really a practical option. It's possible, but it's not practical. Additionally, last minute, they threw at us another option, which was, hey, we also want our customers to be able to type in their own values as well. So not only do we want a number of known possibilities from known options, but we want the customer to be able to type their own values in as well.
So this might be upload their own logos so that they can see their logo on the product. It might be we need them to be able to enter their own length of lighting fixture to the millimeter. This, essentially, turns the number of possible outcomes or the number of possible permutations into an infinite number. It's not possible for us to do the pre-calculations beforehand. So that was really the challenge that we had with one of the light products.
Now, as for the solution, how did we solve this problem? Well, we solved it with our software platform called MinuteView. So let me give you a little bit of a background about MinuteView so that we can set the scene on before we get into the live demo. MinuteView is a modular platform, which means that there is a core set of technologies that drive MinuteView. And that core set of technologies powers each of the modules that sit on top of it.
That core set of functionality starts with the system connectors down at the bottom there. MinuteView has system connectors that enable you to connect to a vast number of different systems. That might be systems like SAP or Autodesk Vault, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, monday.com. Whatever the system is you want to be able to connect to, MinuteView view has system connectors that are already built and allow you to connect to those systems, which is essentially the part that powers the automation engine of MinuteView.
The automation engine comes with every implementation of our platform, and that automation engine is the part that is able to generate those tech sheets, generate engineering documents such as DXF files, STEP files. It might be generating image files. It might be rendering. It might be integrating or sending engineering data from one system to another system or uploading a bill of materials into SAP or whatever it's going to be. That automation engine is really what powers everything moving forward. And you're going to see that automation engine in use once we get into the live demo.
MinuteView is underlined by an AI capability that allows for simple configuration and will assist you as you try to configure your product. MinuteView is a centralized managed system. And the nice part about using MinuteView is it's all browser-based. You don't need to install anything. You don't need to do anything. You just open up a browser session, you go to the URL, and you can go ahead and start configuration right then and there. So no installations required.
There is a REST API built into MinuteView if you're interested. You're able to communicate in and out of MinuteView, which is able to engage with those automation engines. And then because all of this stuff is happening under the hood of MinuteView, we've built another core piece of technology for analytics and monitoring. And this is just to give you some sort of an insight into what is going on inside of your MinuteView platform.
As for the modules that sit on top of MinuteView, starting from the left-hand side, we've got MESH, our AI-powered multi-source enterprise search tool. What this is going to do for you is it's going to bring all of the data available to you via those system connectors into a single unified interface. So if you're running, let's say, SAP, Autodesk Vault, Autodesk Construction Cloud, OpenText Content Server, whatever it is, all of those pieces of data flow into MESH, and you're able to search and find any data that you need inside a single unified platform.
This platform is powered by AI. So your AI assistant is going to assist you in searching on any of the data. And in some cases, you can even just type in a question and get a direct response. Minute Configurator is the tool we'll be talking about the most today. So I'm not going to go into detail on that now because we'll be talking about that in a moment. Minute Archive is our DMS archiving solution. This enables systems like Autodesk Vault or ProjectWise or Windchill or any other DMS system to be able to archive off a lot of this data in order for IT teams to be able to meet their SLAs.
And finally, we have, because we work with so many customers that are leveraging the power of Autodesk Vault, we have a particular package that we've built for MinuteView called MinuteView for Vault, which includes all of the automation functionality, all of the system connectors that you'd expect, all of the analytics and the monitoring and the API calls, along with some Autodesk Vault-specific front end functionality, mark up functionality, all sorts of things built into the package for MinuteView for Vault, which we're really happy with.
And as I mentioned, Minute Configurator is the product we're going to talk about today. So what is Minute Configurator? Well, Minute Configurator is an ecosystem where you can upload your own product and configure it directly inside of MinuteView. The configurator tool can be leveraged on a customer website, or we can essentially take the API endpoint and render it on your own website however you want. The configurator tool enables you to generate 3D models live on a web page.
It enables you to automatically generate those renders data sheets, price estimates, and manufacturing details, all from the Minute Configurator module. So without talking too much more, let's have a look at the configurator tool itself. So let me just head over to an installation I have of MinuteView. In this case, let me just firstly log in to my instance of MinuteView. And I'm going to log in as the system administrator.
So as I log in as the system administrator into MinuteView, I am the system administrator, so it's directed me straight to the analytics page. This is what I've got set up for me at the moment. The analytics page is just the home page for the administrator. And it's telling me all of the information I need to know about what's going on in my system. This analytics page is fully 100% configurable, so you can go ahead and create as many tabs as you want.
You can change it to a new tab, whatever it's going to be. And in here, you can make your own cards. You can configure your report to look any way you want to look. So in my case, I might just go down to Token Usage, Progress Bar, and save my report. And you can see my token usage report there. So you can go ahead and configure this Insights module however you want. And you'll just get it to set it up so that it's displaying the data that you care about the most.
But let's move on from that. And let's start now having a look at the module we want to talk about, which is Configurator. You can see all of the other modules here, but the module we want to talk about today is Configurator. As soon as I click on the Configurator module, it takes me into the list of projects that I've got loaded in Minute Configurator. And the project we're going to talk about today is this gym station project. I want to be clear.
I'm not going to be talking about lighting fixtures in this demo, and that's because of IP restrictions and things like that from the client. But what I will be showing you is I'll be showing you a simplified home gym, where you'll get the same idea. And you'll get an understanding of just how simple it is to configure your own product on a web page. So let's head into the home gym for now, and let's have a look at how to configure something inside of Minute Configurator.
You'll notice as soon as I head into Minute Configurator, I'm given these project setups. These are just your project values, where you can set up all sorts of different things in here. You can see we have set up some CAD settings in here. Now, if we implement the CAD settings, what that means is Configurator is able to render a 3D model of anything we create on the web page live at the point of configuration. If we didn't have these CAD settings, we could just replace it with a carousel of images or whatever it's going to be.
But for the time being, for today's demo, we're going to include an Inventor CAD settings integration. We can also look at other integrations here. There is a build-your-own custom PowerShell as well, which we'll talk about a little bit later on, certainly not required for basic configurations, but something that is available to you if you go down the Configurator path. And the next tab along is the Web Controls.
Web controls, you can see here are-- we have three web controls for us now. We have Laydown Bench Control. We have a Lap Pool Control, and we have a Max White Plate Count. So if we want to see what this looks like, let's just head over to the preview. MinuteView allows us to preview our configuration before we go live with it. So I'm going to head into the preview area so that I can preview exactly what my configurator is going to look like.
As you can see, within seconds, MinuteView has rendered and created me a fully interactive 3D model of exactly what I've chosen from my configurations here. You can see, I can zoom in. I can zoom out. I can select on different things. I can see detail. I can orbit around. The reason why all of this is so important is because, again, it's developing that emotional connection from your client. If the client can interact with your product in a very, very realistic way, they're going to feel more and more confident that the product they're buying is what they're expecting.
So that is going to fast forward your product sales. As I choose different options, I might change it from a double lay down bench to a single lay down bench. And within just a couple of seconds, again, this is going to render live on the web page my new 3D model. So just in case you're thinking, none of this is pre-rendered, this is all doing it live at the point of selection inside of my preview here. I can go through and select on my different options.
And again, within just a second or two, the new product is available for me to interact with as I go through. So what if I wanted to add some more controls in here? So in this case, we've only got a very, very simple configurator set up. We've got a double and a single lay down bench. We've got a double and a single Lat pull. And we've got three options for weights. So the number of possible permutations here is very, very few.
So let's add a few more. Let's give the customer a little bit more to configure. So let's head back into the configurator. And in the web controls, I'm going to add a new Web Control now and head over here. This time, I'm going to include a color, because we want the client to be able to specify-- spell it right, James-- the color. As we go through, we should just be clicking Save just in case something goes wrong. But I'm just going to add another two options here.
So for example, I want to bring online the option for my clients to be able to choose black as well as white. So I'm going to type black in option two and white in option one, hit Save. And now, I can head straight back into my preview, hit the Refresh button. It's going to default back to all of those default settings, but it's going to now have a new parameter there called Color Rendered live, right then and there, that quick. And choosing black will instantly rerender the entire thing and make the visuals align with what I'd expect.
So it is just that easy and that fast to add your own custom parameters and build up this parameter list. As you can see, as I go through, I can really start to configure the product to meet what I want in my requirements. But again, we're still dealing with a finite number of different possibilities in here. In order for me to really demonstrate the power of Minute Configurator, what we can do is we can then go through and add one more parameter.
Let me just reset this. One more parameter, but this time, I'm not going to use a picklist. I am going to allow the customer, the user of the website, the ability to type in their own text. And in this case, they're going to be able to type in their own brand. So let's go ahead and hit Save on that one, head back over to my Minute Configurator, hit the Refresh button. Again, it's going to revert back to all the default settings, but there's going to be a new parameter there now.
That new parameter, you can see, is brand. And if I zoom in here, I can see the brand is Tentech, aligned with what I'd expect to see here. Let's now change that to Autodesk. In fact, it might be Autodesk Virtual. Something. Doesn't really matter. As I click, I enter that value. And within just a couple of seconds, my customized product is available to me exactly with the information I've asked it to build. So this is just sort of proof that not only can we use the pick-listed parameters, but we have given our customer the ability to completely customize their product to suit exactly what they want.
So it's no longer just one of the options picked from a list, like on the Tesla website, for example. It's now a 100% customized product for the end client. You can see we've got a couple of different control options here. These are just pick lists. These are the simplest ones for me to set up. But you probably have noticed that when I go to the option sets in here, if I look at the option sets here, there are a series of other parameters in here or properties in here I can choose.
So an icon, for example. I can include an icon into my user interface so that, again, it feels a little bit more like a personal experience on the web page. So in this case, you can see I've just chosen a picklist, which is a bit boring. But if I had icons for each of these different options, I could then have those icons rendered on the web page as well. So just to show you what that would look like, I've got another option here, which is actually a lighting product.
But if I head over to this particular lighting product, this one has some icons that have been rendered here as well. So they've got a selected icon. They've got an unselected icon. Just really makes it feel a bit more personal.
And all you have to do is just enter the parameter type and include a couple of icons. It's that easy to really build the brand to make it feel a little bit better. And finally, on this particular example, we have other information in here, data sheet specification information, which is dependent on what's been entered on the configuration options here as well.
So these are all being calculated at the back end before it's brought to the front end. This is the area that you would use that if you wanted to give pricing information, you could put pricing information in here as well. Or if you wanted to provide a link to download a data sheet, you could do it in this area as well. So that's what our clients have been using it for. So that's a little bit about the front end use of Minute Configurator and how we're able to quickly and easily build any product into Minute Configurator and allow us to build any parameters for any product.
It's very, very easy to get started on. And you get the results very, very quickly. So let's head back, and let's look at the next part of the process for PierLite. Now, as I mentioned at the start of the talk, for PierLite, they required the entire solution, from start to finish, all the way through to manufacture, to be automated. They did not want any manual intervention at all. So for the customer, they needed to have the product renders done as soon as the client says that they want to purchase the product.
They needed all of the data sheets done. So all of this information is customer-specific data sheet information that they needed done based on what configuration had been selected on the website. They also needed manufacturing drawings done, of course, because they want those manufacturing drawings sent automatically to the workshop to start the manufacturing process. This is just file outputs, too. The customer also said to us they needed the data to be uploaded to the corresponding systems.
So in our case, the client said to us, we need a lead generated in CRM as soon as somebody expresses some interest in the product. So we needed that lead to be generated straight away in the CRM system. Once the CRM system had the lead, we also needed a bill of materials to be uploaded into SAP because we don't want to have to wait for the bill of materials to be entered manually. So we need all of that information uploaded to SAP straightaway.
All of this data flow needs to happen right away at the point of a register of interest for this particular client. So that's essentially the challenge that we had. After we give them a beautiful front end, we then need to take care of the back end. One of the other really nice parts, and I mentioned this at the start, was that because Minute Configurator was able to handle all of this, all of the front end and all of the back end, when Signify Global purchased PierLite, they took one look at the Minute Configurator and said, we can apply this to our product ranges as well.
So they were very, very heavily invested in 3D printing world. And what Minute Configurator was able to do was leverage what was already done in the Signify Global system and spit out the back end, engineering data, bill of materials, data, everything that needed to happen at the back end automatically, which was just leveraging systems that they'd purchased from PierLite when they first did that purchase. So not only did MinuteView solve the problem for PierLite, but once PierLite was purchased by Signify, Signify saw the value of it as well and expanded the use of it significantly into their 3D printed range.
So what does the back end part look like? So how do we get the data from where it is now into our other systems? How do we generate those engineering pieces of information as well? So let's now have a look at the next part of the demonstration, which is the completion information. Now, I should specify as well that all of everything I'm about to show you here is optional. Minute Configurator is so flexible that it allows you to work with practically any systems.
In this case, the customer needed to be able to do integrations with other systems. So we needed to be able to give them that functionality as well. And that's what Minute Configurator was able to do. What you're about to see is not critical for everything that you might need to do initially. But it's more of this is what we had to do for this particular client. So one of the things that they wanted was to generate the engineering drawings. They also wanted to upload data to SharePoint for distribution.
So let's head into the PowerShell editor of MinuteView. The first thing you'll notice is I'm not leaving. I'm not loading up some application on my PC. This is all browser-based. Everything that you do inside of MinuteView is browser-based, so you're not having to install things and try and get programming, coding working. It all just works from the start. And it's very, very intuitive. You can see down the left-hand side, I've got all my variables.
I can hover over my variables and have a look at what information has been posted into this script. The last time it ran, you can see it was white, double, double, 20, and so on and so forth. Autodesk Virtual was the last one that ran. You can also see that if I go into the Code Editor itself and just start typing, as I start typing, my helpful hints are going to help me code to make sure I don't make simple spelling mistakes and things like that as well.
So that's all the sort of thing that you'd expect from a nice, powerful programming environment. Stay with me if you're not a programmer, because the outcome of this is going to be really great. While I'm here, I might as well go through the simple stuff. There's Find, there's Replace, all of the things you'd want. But one of the things that we've done in the MinuteView platform is, yes, you could write your own code to do all of the things you need to do, but what we've done is we've built a series of commands that make code writing infinitely simpler than what it would be otherwise.
So for example, if you wanted to be able to connect to SharePoint, we've given you a command to do exactly that, Open SharePoint Connection. There's a command there with the prompts to tell you exactly how to go about opening up a new SharePoint connection. If you want to a list of all of the available commands, you can just click on the button here to show a full list of all of the available commands. All of them are there. You've got things like connecting to Dynamics 365.
You've got raw HTML information there. You've got monday.com, [? Markups, ?] SharePoint, Autodesk Vault, Configurator. You've got so many different environments you can connect to directly from within this PowerShell environment. And baked into our coding experience is our AI as well. So if you're a coder, you'll know that best practice as you write your code, you should be writing debug information as you go through.
And if I wanted to just add some information here, maybe so that I could trace where my code got to the last time it ran or whatever it was, instead of me typing out debug information, I can just pick where I want the debug line to go, and I can just click the Log button. This will read the code that's already been written and spit out a log file for me. So this will now tell me, you have opened a SharePoint connection successfully to this client ID, this SharePoint URL.
Great. That was really helpful. I can then go ahead and continue on. In this case, this code is simply going to open up a new SharePoint connection, confirm that that SharePoint connection has been opened, create a new folder inside of SharePoint, and upload two files, a hero image file and a bill of materials Excel spreadsheet. Those two files are going to be uploaded directly in the back end anytime a new iteration is going to be generated.
The other thing, too, and you might be a coder, you might not be, it doesn't really matter. What we've been able to do is build into our system an AI that can assist you if you're just not really sure on how to code. Or maybe you're a JavaScript coder, and you're not really sure what that code would look like in PowerShell or whatever it is. If that's the case, you can just type out what you want to achieve. In this case, I want to test if the file hero full path exists and throw an error if it's missing.
From there, I can just click the little autocomplete button. And that will write me code that does a test to confirm that the file exists. And if it doesn't exist, it'll throw an appropriate message, and then, finally, upload the files to SharePoint. Let's go ahead and hit Save on our PowerShell script now and head back to our configurator. Again, I'm going to click the Preview button. It's going to generate a brand new iteration, a brand new render of that image.
But this time, it's going to automatically create the hero image file and the bill of materials and upload them both into SharePoint. This is the SharePoint file that it's been uploaded to. You can see the spec folder is currently empty. Let me just hit Refresh. There's my new spec folder. It was created just a couple of seconds ago. If I look in that folder, I can now see my hero image and my bill of materials. If I click on my bill of materials, I can see the bill of materials here exactly formatted like it should be.
Finally, let me close out of this PowerShell, head back into my configurator. We also have the ability to do these completion tasks as well. So in my case, I'm going to turn on the completion tasks to run as soon as a new iteration is generated. These completion tasks will run things like creating drawing files and output them to PDF. Or we can run our own PowerShell in here as well. The nice part about these completion tasks are they run on a separate server or separate thread of information so that you don't actually have to do it right then and there.
You can actually just offload this to a different thread so it's not slowing down the front end of the user experience. So again, if I just hit, again, I'll just head back to here so that there's no smoke and mirrors here. You can see if I hit Refresh, there's still only one folder there, but this time, I'm going to hit Refresh again. This time, because I've turned on my completion tasks, it's going to generate me a brand new drawing file. And we asked it to create a drawing file as well.
That drawing file will then be created as a PDF and uploaded to SharePoint. This is just a simple example of how quick and easy it is for us to integrate systems together. Heading back over to SharePoint again, I'm just going to hit Refresh. Here is this one that was created a few seconds ago. Opening up that one. And we can now see not only is there an iteration ID here with a bill of materials and a hero image, but now, we have the drawing file as well. And you can see the drawing file is our technical drawing.
So all of that functionality just falls out the back end of Minute Configurator and is very, very simple for us to configure and set up. So the result. So the result from PierLite and their feedback was fantastic. In fact, they really, really emphasized that the customer experience with configurator was leaps and bounds better than what it has been. Their engagement was really, really high, and their follow through to purchase was much, much higher than what they've had in the past.
So by implementing a configurator on their web page, using Minute Configurator, they were able to really emphasize their product, get people to interact with their product, and feel connected to their product, and therefore follow through with the actual purchase. Additionally, the results we were able to get were reducing their lead time from the point of configuration all the way through to the manufacture deliver was 34 weeks. We've been able to reduce that through the implementation of Minute Configurator from 34 weeks to down to three weeks.
So the clients are happy. They're getting their products much, much faster. The company is happy. They're able to sell more. They're able to have fewer people involved. There's less manual intervention in all of these missing steps that we've been able to automate. Not to mention that 34 weeks is assuming that everything went right. So there was quite a lot of times where the bill of materials might have been entered manually and there might have been a mistake in there. So they would have had to go back and correct the mistakes and things like that.
So by automating everything, you're taking out that human error factor as well. So finally, the results from the case study. We digitized the configuration process for dozens of their products in their product range. We integrated each of the configurations with a CRM and an ERP system. We automated the creation of manufacturing and customer deliverables. We restricted the configurations and enforced product compliant.
That's a huge part of what we've done as well, which is something that we haven't really shown in the demonstration, but it's certainly part of configurator is to make sure that they can only select on products that are actually possible. And we've improved the customer responsiveness significantly. When customers feel like they have an influence over the product configuration, they're much more likely to proceed with a purchase.
And of course, they've been able to differentiate themselves from their competitors. So that's everything from me today. I very much appreciate your time. Thank you all for joining me. This is my details if you want to get in contact. Aside from that, have a lovely day.
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