Online product configurators and Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) tools are increasing in popularity due to their ability to help you provide a customized experience to your clients, which helps you stay in front of your competitors and elevate your customer engagement in a cost-effective way. With an online product configurator, your customers will be able to develop and see 3D previews of their products and get pricing information, all while your back end runs smoothly. In this article, we look at how DriveWorks can help your team provide the best experience for your customers. We show you some of the product’s features and how they are beneficial for your clients and most importantly, your business.
What is DriveWorks?
DriveWorks is an online product configurator software that in collaboration with SOLIDWORKS, provides manufacturers the ability to drive designs and create online configurators to sell their products. With customers having the ability to design their personalized products, you can save time and reduce re-works and errors. With DriveWorks, you can provide your customers an immediate quote, speeding up your sales process.
Let’s look at the main three steps you need to consider when using a sales configurator:
- Design the user interface: With DriveWorks, users have complete control over the style and behavior of the configurator. With over twenty different user interface controls such as images, text inputs, drop-down menus and buttons, users can tailor the interface to suit any need.
Click to enlarge - Build rules and logic: Once the interface has been created, critical product design information can be entered into custom rules created in the DriveWorks rules builder. These rules are then used to generate the needed 3D designs and create sales and manufacturing documentation (quotes and prints).
Click to enlarge - Configure again and again: Once complete, customers, sales teams and even distributors can configure your products on any device from anywhere. Since the configurator can build these new models and generate automatically, the time-to-market for new designs also decreases as the designers are no longer tasked with creating each available iteration of a product manually.
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Benefits of Using DriveWorks
Interactive 3D Visualization
Through the online interface, customers can see the changes made to the product in real-time with interactive 3D visualization. You can identify and promote up sell opportunities and suitable aftermarket service packages and warranties and enhance your customer’s understanding by communicating design details with interactive 3D visualizations.
- Easily communicate complex designs
- Import existing 3D models and geometries. DriveWorks supports files in .stl, .obj, .gtlf, .gtlb, .iam, .ipt, .par, .psm and .asm formats
- View products in immersive Virtual Reality (VR), mate MBD and CAM
Any Device, Anywhere
Customers and sales representatives can access the online configurator from any device, eliminating the need to configure solely from a PC.
- Create a responsive configurator, optimized for all browsers and devices
- Embed the configurator into your website to allow customers to configure and order products anytime
- Control users and security through setting up intelligent workflows and control users and security
Seamless Integration
DriveWorks operates seamlessly with existing company CRM, ERP, CAD and MRP Systems
- Pull existing company data from CRM system
- Share data with other company systems
- Automate MBD and CAM with the built-in SOLIDWORKS PDM integration
Automatically Create Documents
When it comes time to generate the needed sales and manufacturing information, reports can be done automatically with predefined templates that match your company branding.
- Create Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF, HTML, XML and text files
- Send automatic emails with generated documents and approval drawings attached
- Create BOMs, cut lists and supporting documents for manufacturing
>> Learn about DriveWorks CPQ and Design Automation
DriveWorks is a great fit for any manufacturer that builds many products that are similar in nature or a single product that has many options for production. Check out this demo we put together to see how online configuration can improve a customer’s experience with a product.
Whether your company is big or small, DriveWorks can help you bring an enhanced design and purchasing experience to your customers while keeping your operations as efficient as possible.
Take a deeper look into what all DriveWorks has to offer with our Get To Know DriveWorks on-Demand Webinar, where TriMech Application Engineer, Devin Martin, explores DriveWorks in SOLIDWORKS.
