Manufacturers of complex products and systems have special challenges. Sometimes they have many different products, and the challenge is to select the one that best meets the customer's needs. Sometimes they have an 'assemble-to-order' or 'engineer-to-order' product that has to be designed to meet the customer's needs. In either case, expert knowledge is required to do the job right, but this expert knowledge rarely resides in the person who is face-to-face (or on the phone) with the customer. This puts the sales person into the role of information-gatherer and communicator, while applications engineers back at the home office actually design the solution. Sales proposal generation can take a week or more.
Sometimes the manufacturer has decided that fast turnaround of proposals is critical, so they staff the front line with sales engineers. This can be a very expensive solution, and it is still difficult to ensure that all sales engineers are working with the latest information and tools.
Once a proposal is accepted, detailed drawings and bills of materials necessary for implementation need to be generated, and this can add time and cost to the process of filling the order.
Apprentice Systems captures the knowledge of the applications engineers and embeds it in a tool that can be used by the sales people. Capturing design rules is done through a visual interface that makes it relatively easy to enter the knowledge and maintain it. This does several things: it ensures fast turnaround, it ensures everyone is working with the latest (and same) information, and it ensures that all relevant issues have been considered and the proposal is complete. The generation of the bill of materials and detailed drawings is done automatically, saving time and effort in both the proposal creation and implementation. 3D visualization of 2D schematics is available, which is a powerful sales tool for certain types of products and systems.
