Published: August 2001
For the latest product information, please see www.microsoft.com/office/visio
Any sales proposal takes time and thought but when an engineering bid takes a full week to develop, automating the process holds great appeal. Creating a tool that can incorporate all of the steps and absorb all of the knowledge down the line — from a customer’s rough sketch to a detailed bill of materials — is a daunting challenge. Apprentice Systems, a Microsoft Visio® solution provider, meets that challenge with tools built on the Visio 2002. Visio 2002 offers a rich object and event model and its SmartShape® technology is the perfect vehicle for building knowledge into Apprentice’s sales automation tools.
Apprentice Systems co-founder Steve Strong has worked for years in the knowledge-based engineering arena, solving complex design and engineering problems with object-oriented tools. A Visio enthusiast, he has been creating tools and solutions in Visio since the release of Visio 4.0. These tools make it possible to rapidly construct customized sales proposal systems and automated engineering and quotation solutions for manufacturers and resellers of complex products or systems.
For example, Apprentice Systems collaborated with a team of sales engineers and system designers at Motorola to develop a Visio-based solution to design the complex radio communication systems used by police and other public safety officials. The system uses “smart” Visio shapes to represent system components such as two-way radio sites, cabling, and dispatch center communication equipment. These smart shapes contain the information needed to size and price an entire system, reducing a complex proposal process into a simple Visio diagram.
With a new version of Visio on the horizon, Strong was eager to have his company participate in the Visio 2002 Rapid Deployment Program. He was underway with a project that would benefit from a migration to the new version of Visio.
In 1999, Strong met Ron Wall on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Wall, CEO of Rosewood Equipment, had just seen an impressive smart wiring solution for home stereo systems that Apprentice Systems had built and integrated with Visio. Could a similar solution be developed for the bidding process at Flowtronex, one of Rosewood’s holdings?
Flowtronex PSI makes pre-fabricated modular pumping systems for a variety of industries; applications range from pumps that boost service water in manufacturing plants to systems that circulate hot oil in food processing plants. Although pre-fabricated, every pumping system is tailored to the customer’s environment, and each sales proposal requires a custom bid.
When a quote is requested, Flowtronex must respond with a detailed drawing and a comprehensive bill of materials. The quote may well originate from a sales rep’s “sketch on a cocktail napkin.” Back in the office, an expert using a computer-aided-design program, AutoCAD®, must re-create the sketch as a detailed drawing.
The process continues with a requisitions engineer validating the drawing, sizing the components, and reviewing the selected parts in detail. For example, the engineer needs to determine if operating conditions require valve connections to be welded or threaded. Design validation may take several passes and is subject to human error at every pass. When the drawing is finally accurate, the engineer creates a bill of materials by looking up part numbers and pasting them and associated costs into a spreadsheet which then calculates the cost of the system. Finally, a proposal package is delivered to the customer. The process can take days, and there is no guarantee that the customer will buy.
Unfortunately, every time a new bid is requested, the process must be repeated from scratch. There is no provision for re-bidding an assemblage; this means that the accumulated costs, part numbers, and other intelligence about the components in an assemblage must be entered anew.
Flowtronex wanted a sales automation solution that would be easy enough for field salespeople to use but robust enough to include all of the steps and information required for an accurate—and automatic — bid on its complex pumping systems. Apprentice Systems had just the expertise Flowtronex needed. Its smart, visual sales automation tools, the Apprentice Mentor and the Design Apprentice, are deeply integrated with Visio. These tools would prove effective in enabling Flowtronex to replace a cumbersome manual bidding process with an automatic bidding solution.
The first of the sales automation tools, the Apprentice Mentor, uses custom Visio 2002 shapes to capture the bidding process visually and document rules bidders should use to size and select engineering components. It associates the captured knowledge with master shapes used during the construction of a proposal. The Mentor then automatically generates a custom Visio application and stores the design and product modeling rules in a database. It works like the other software and database design solutions that are a part of Visio 2002 Professional, and simplifies designing configuration systems to diagramming business rules.
Figure 1 This Apprentice Mentor diagram describes the association between the rules for component selection and Visio master shapes.
The Visio 2002 rich automation model, wide selection of shapes, and smart behaviors make it an ideal environment in which to build a knowledge-capturing tool. “I could not imagine building a forms-based interface to collect information that is so visual,” Strong says.
The second sales automation tool, the Design Apprentice, is used to deploy the collected knowledge while a quote is constructed. It scans the Visio drawing for Apprentice-enabled shapes, pulls the associated rules from the database, and acts on these rules. Design Apprentice assures that illegal connections are prevented; it applies rules to size components and generates a bill of materials.The Design Apprentice is a C++ program that integrates with the Visio 2002 automation model using COM. The COM layer allows the Design Apprentice to plug into any version of Visio, and read the knowledge generated by Apprentice Mentor.
At about the time that Flowtronex asked Apprentice Systems to streamline its bidding process, the company also hired engineer and designer Lewis Solomon as Business Systems Coordinator. Solomon and Strong became fast partners in adapting the Apprentice Mentor and Design Apprentice into a custom sales automation solution that Flowtronex calls the Configurator.
Strong explains, “Apprentice Systems philosophy is, ‘If you can draw it, you can solve it.’ At Flowtronex, we started with a Knowledge Capture Seminar for the applications engineers where we spent three days using the Mentor to create a Visio document that mapped out the steps required in a bid.” Strong collected design knowledge by drawing diagrams instead of writing code. As engineers described design scenarios and the benefits of using relief valves, socket welds, and inline strainers, their rules were recorded using the custom knowledge-capturing shapes provided by Apprentice Mentor. The seminar produced pages of design rules all documented as Visio drawings.
After the seminar, development continued apace. Working through Microsoft® NetMeeting® from offices in Ohio and Texas, Strong and Solomon continued to revise Visio documents and shapes that represented pumping systems components. Over 100 shapes placed on about 10 stencils (most of them taken from the Visio Professional 2002 Piping and Instrumentation Diagramming solution or generated automatically), were associated with the knowledge that had been stored in the database.
As the knowledge base grew the Flowtronex Configurator became smarter and smarter. Solomon built test cases to teach it to become expert. When a food processing company requested a bid from Flowtronex for a Clean-in-Place (CIP) system to wash its potato processing plant, Solomon used the Configurator for the quote. He had collected enough rules to compress hundreds of design steps into a single drag and drop operation; steps that previously took hours now only took seconds. Rules linked the shapes in the Visio 2002 drawing to data in an Access database. The output was automatically sent to an Excel spreadsheet. The entire bid was completed in less than a day, one-tenth the time it had taken previously.
In 2000, Solomon launched the Configurator in the requisitions area at Flowtronex. The next step is use the Configurator in the field. “Sales people do not have time learn to use AutoCAD, it is too complex, but they already have multiple Microsoft products on their laptops, so it will be easy for them to use Visio 2002.”
Figure 2 The Design Apprentice checks the drawing and manages the engineering details; it works somewhat like a spell checker for designs and quotations.
For more information: www.microsoft.com/office/visio
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.
© 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, the Office logo, SmartShapes, Visio, and NetMeeting are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Printed in the USA. Part No. 098-92555.
