Only six people could price it. Now the whole network can.
A multinational LED manufacturer had a quoting problem that looked like a training problem. Contour lighting, channel letters and lightboxes all needed rules that distributors kept getting wrong so every quote came back to head office. We have built three configurators that moved the expertise into the software, and we are building two more.
- Sales growth in twelve months
Sales growth in twelve months
- Configurators, commissioned oneafter another
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Configurators, commissioned one
after another
- Who can produce a correct quote
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Who can produce a correct quote
- Calculated per run, not estimated
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Calculated per run, not estimated
A decade old, multinational, and supplying globally famous brands.
A multinational manufacturer of LED lighting systems, ten years in the business, whose products illuminate the storefronts and signage of globally famous brands.That client base is the point. When a global brand rolls out a format across hundreds of sites, every one of those sites is a slightly different building different frontage lengths, different fascia dimensions, different letter heights. The product is standard. The installation never is.
They sell through their own team and through a network of distributors and resellers.
A standard product, sold into hundreds of non-standard buildings, by people who don't work for you.
The rules were correct. The people applying them weren't always.
Quoting an LED installation meant sitting down and working it out. How many tubes or modules. What spacing between them. Which rules applied to this configuration. Then building a quote from all of it. It took real time, and more damagingly it could only be done by a handful of people.
Distributors got it wrong.
The channel was closest to the customer and best placed to quote, but the calculations had enough rules and enough exceptions that mistakes were common. A wrong module count is a shortfall on site; a wrong power supply is a warranty claim.
So everything routed to head office.
Because errors were expensive, the core team did the quoting. Which meant a global sales network was fed through a handful of desks in one building.
And the bottleneck was capped.
Growth in enquiries meant either more people who could do the calculation, or slower answers. For a manufacturer supplying international rollouts, neither was acceptable.
We didn't train the network. We moved the expertise into the tool.
The instinctive fix is more training and better documentation. It doesn't work, because the problem isn't that distributors don't know the rules, it's that applying dozens of interacting rules by hand, under time pressure, produces errors no matter who does it.
So we took the calculation away from the person entirely. The rules the core team held in their heads went into software that anyone in the network can run, with the wrong answers simply unavailable.
The manufacturer keeps control of what the rules are. The channel gets to quote at the speed of the conversation.
The expertise didn't need distributing. It needed encoding.
Draw the building. The software lights it.
ContourIQ handles outline and contour lighting the LED runs that trace the edges of a building.The user draws the top view of the building, selects the LED product and the colour, and the software places the lighting along the outline. Not as a diagram, but as a real specification: it knows the actual lengths of the walls it has been given.
Cut to fit, within the rules of the product.
LEDs arrive in standard lengths and have to be cut to fit each wall exactly. Each unit can only be cut once, which is a genuine constraint rather than a preference so the software works out which standard lengths go where, and where a cut is permissible.
Power calculated per run, not in total.
The software computes the load on each individual run and places the power supplies accordingly. A total figure would be easy and wrong; what matters is that each run is fed correctly.
A complete bill of materials.
LED units at their cut lengths, power supplies where they are needed, and every accessory the installation requires. Nothing left to be remembered on site.
Then they came back. And kept coming back.
ContourIQ went live and worked. What followed says more about the relationship than any figure we could publish.
Three configurators live since 2021, each covering a different product line and each built on the same principle the rules live in the software, and the whole network can use them.
Two more are in build now. The relationship is five years old and still adding systems.
LuminaBox
applies the same approach to illuminated lightboxes the panel product behind fascia signage and menu boards.
LuminaForge
does it for channel letters, where each individual letter is its own small lighting problem: interior area, module placement, power feed and the interaction between letter geometry and how evenly it lights.
The best case study we have for whether a system works is whether the client comes back to build the next one.
Sales grew 60% in twelve months.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Quoting capacity stopped being limited by how many people at head office could do the calculation.
A distributor with a customer in front of them can now produce a technically correct quote, with a valid bill of materials and correctly sized power supplies, without sending anything back to the core team and without waiting for someone in another country to be at their desk.
The core team still uses the same tools. They are just no longer the only ones who can.
If only a few people can quote it, that's not a training problem.
Most manufacturers who sell through a channel have some version of this. The distributor is closest to the customer and knows the least about the product; head office knows the product and is furthest from the sale. The gap gets filled with training, price lists and phone calls, and it never quite closes.
Encoding the rules closes it in one move and it does something training cannot. It makes the wrong answer impossible rather than merely discouraged.
If your channel could sell more of your product but keeps having to ask you how, that is the same problem.
Could your distributors quote without you?
If the answer is no and the reason is that they would get it wrong the rules can usually be built into software instead.
Thirty minutes. Show us one quote your channel couldn't produce on their own.