Revolutionising Design Processes with Digital AR

Tolsan is a company specialised in high-quality, precision-engineered cutting tools and industrial components. As a manufacturer of awnings, wooden pergolas, mobile roofs, etc., and with a strong emphasis on innovation and excellence, Tolsan provides a wide range of products designed to meet the rigorous demands of various industries. Their commitment to advanced technology and customer satisfaction positions them as a leading player in the global market for cutting solutions.

The customer lacked an advanced configurator for designing their final product, relying instead on a basic tool that serves only a subset of their product range. This basic configurator is primarily intended for production purposes, without any commercial functionality, and does not provide visualisations of the configured product. This limitation complicates the process of designing the final product efficiently and effectively.

Then, the main challenge is to develop a system that allows crafting virtually any product within the possibilities of the customer, for both production and commercial purposes, with the corresponding visualisation of it. Additionally, the customer has requested the integration of automatic three-dimensional scenario generation, which would place the product in a virtual environment and showcase it using augmented reality.

First of all, regarding the investment rationale, from the very beginning the customer was aware of the possibility of improving the sales process for attracting more market share. This is precisely the reason for the investment in this digitalisation case.

The solution proposed by i4CAMHUB, addresses every stage of a customer's product's commercial development, combining automated processes with supervised oversight, from initial product definition and configuration to creating a sales proposal.

Starting with the product definition, the process begins with the product configurator, a central component of the solution that calculates product properties based on a detailed web form. This form collects all necessary inputs and options to fully define the product.

Once the product design is complete, the configurator automatically generates a detailed three-dimensional model. This model is then placed into a virtual scenario that can be viewed using augmented reality. For example, when a user points their camera at a building facade, the system overlays the configured product onto the facade in real-time.

This augmented reality component of the system is mainly thought for the clients of the customer to check whether the product has been defined according to their needs in such a realistic manner. If adjustments are needed, clients can revise the initial inputs through the web form, and the process will start anew until the product design meets their needs.

Additionally, the system can automatically generate a sales proposal that incorporates details from the web form, graphical content from the 3D model, and information from the customer's ERP system. This proposal helps streamline the sales process and ensures that all client requirements are addressed.

The first result obtained from the project execution is an initial assessment report of the customer situation including several aspects: 

• The initial diagnostic about the situation of the customer before the implementation of the demonstrator configuration system.

• A development plan aiming to improve digital transformation capacities of the entity.

• An evaluation for applying new technologies within the customer work methodology.

Secondly, the integration of every different old configurator for each kind of product offered by the customer in a single form, meaning a common interface that allows to define all the fundamental input data in a more centralised way. The benefit obtained from this result is the ability of defining different types of products in the same interface.

On the other hand, other result included in the system is a commercial product configurator with which the three-dimensional model of the product can be generated automatically and in real time. In this case, the benefit is the visualisation of the product in real time and virtually directly by the own client for improving the commercial labour.

Additionally, the automatic quotation component included in the configurator system is a considerable result of the project too, for creating automatically the offer proposal to the client, taking into account the information from the product configuration.

Furthermore, another result is the augmented reality creation module to show the three-dimensional model of the configured product.

Finally, the corresponding training to the customer employees for using the system properly and effectively by means of a user manual file and system description file.