Customer story ยท Industrial heating elements
Quoting cut from 30–45 minutes to 3–5 minutes
How an industrial heating element manufacturer moved 200+ engineering formulas out of fragile spreadsheets and into a rules-based configurator, and what happened to their quoting, error rate, and onboarding.
The problem: expertise trapped in spreadsheets
The manufacturer builds cartridge, tubular, defrost, and oven heaters, engineered products where wattage, sheath material, geometry, and termination all interact. The engineering knowledge to configure them correctly lived in complex spreadsheets spread across multiple files.
- Only a few engineers understood the calculations: a single point of failure
- Field sales had no remote access, so every quote queued behind engineering
- Multiple "authoritative" spreadsheet copies drifted out of sync
- Spec sheets and quotes were assembled by hand after each configuration
- Onboarding a new engineer took months of training
The solution: encode the engineering, once
Working with the manufacturer's engineers, we translated more than 200 engineering formulas into a web-based configurator with validation on every input. Anyone on the team, including field sales, configures a product in the browser and gets:
- Real-time 3D visualization of the configured element
- An automated bill of materials with cost breakdowns
- A generated PDF spec sheet, no manual assembly
- Manufacturing process routing exported to the ERP
Delivery ran in five phases, from the core configurator through ERP and CRM integration, with the platform in production use from the early phases onward.
The results
Quoting that took 30–45 minutes of engineering time now takes 3–5 minutes and no longer requires an engineer at all. The calculation error rate since go-live is zero, because the formulas run with validation instead of being re-keyed per quote. New employees reach productivity in days instead of months: the configurator is the training.
This engagement is where Ignitionary comes from. The patterns proven here, rules-based configuration, live 3D, automated BOMs and spec sheets, ERP routing, are what Ignitionary productizes for every manufacturer. The tubular heater configurator embedded on our homepage and in the live demo is the direct descendant of this work.
Engagement delivered by Uptimize Solutions LLC, the company behind Ignitionary. The customer is anonymized by request; details available in a sales conversation. The full engineering write-up is on the Uptimize Solutions site.
Your products have formulas like these
Bring one to a 20-minute call and we will sketch how its rules, pricing, and outputs would work in Ignitionary.