Let’s start by stating – Always be carefull what you ask your team to do!
After a recent webinar about SAP’s shift from LO-VCLO-VC LO-VC: SAP logistics – variant-configuration SAP’s own implementation of variant-configuration for the ERP-system SAP-ECC to AVC we concluded about the advantages and some of the shortcomings of both generations of SAP’s take on variant-configuration.
Limits of VC
Comprehensive industry-solutions (factory lines, scientific-lab-equipment, facilities, heavy-equipment) cry for better accessability, collaborative in nature and easy to learn.
SAP with their Solution-Sales-Configuration (SSC) already addressed some of the issues of individualised comprehensive industry solutions (which is our clients typical business) for cnfiguration but the modelling still requires not only product experts but VC and strong coding expertise.
In 1996 I initially created the vision of combining modelling, planning, simulating, explaining and configuring whole lineups of products and services in one interactive environment. This should then integrate into business applications for pricing, selling, manufacturing and servicing the industry-solution. This vision was internally called 4d-enterprise. At that time, we had lots of experience in the gaming industry but had to realize, combining games and business applications was not something we were able to achieve at that time. Fast forward to September 2023 I decided to give the vision another try, get a small team of gaming experts into our SAP-experts team and combine their expertise to create interactive visuals for client products and solutions to eventually integrate them into game-like environments to demonstrate product features, test functionality, simulate implementation etc.
Customer Journey starts with the user-experience of your own teams!
Watching some of the modelling-experience for product managers / construction-engineers and furthermore the user-experience when configuring the client-solution for a quotation I was curíous if the modelling could not be made less of a coding and numbercrunching experience.
There has to be a fresh approach to modelling and configuring.
My team had already created alpha-builds of our 4DE4DE 4DE is ZEBROS interpretation of “4-dimensions experience”. It is a framework, plattform and service to enable visual presentation, simulation, configuration of comprehensive products, solutions and services in an immersive personalized 3D-world… environment and I was keen on showing a real product to some of my clients. Unfortunately the only models we already had were still under NDA. I asked my team if they did not have something fresh and compelling to satisfy our client’s curiosity.
About a week later during a bi-weekly they came up with: