Enhance Your Export Sales Process with Sales Automation Solutions for Export

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okay everybody thank you so much for joining us today welcome to K Virtual Academy my name is Christina un I'm a part of the marketing team and I help facilitate these sessions so I'm so happy that you're here today we have Joshua McBride joining us and the title of today's session is preparing for a sales automation solution using 3D models in ton so thank you again for joining we're excited you're here this is your first session welcome welome and if you are a returning learner welcome back we're so happy that you're here uh please reach out to us if we can help you in any way at support e.com um we host these sessions every Thursday but we also work with manufacturers so we would love to help you out and I would like to invite you to our exclusive in-person virtual and virtual event series our manufacturing leaders exchange um these are sessions that are taking place throughout the country we've had a few in cities like Denver Dallas Texas and we have one upcoming in San Jose California if you're not in San Jose California though we have a few others that are going to be virtual so uh you can scan the QR code with your phone and register to join us for a virtual session or one in San Jose and finally at the end of the session today you will see a link uh you will get a link on your screen to fill out a survey let us know how we're doing let us know what kind of topics you want to so we can continue to make these sessions great and if you'd like someone to reach out to you uh you can fill it out on that form as well and we will reach out to you thank you again and we'll go ahead and get started all right well uh it's time to start our KVA for today today we're g to be kind of covering the first piece of preparing for CES automation uh solution uh and today we're going to be looking at 3D models and visualization intact on cpq so let's move on here so kind of for our agenda today uh we'll start with a quick introduction of who I am Joshua McBride we'll talk just a quick second about Ka and uh who we are and what we offer we're gonna do a quick review of the last presentation um and then we will move into our uh main presentation today which is product visualization we're going to talk about what visualization is versus Cad and the key differen is there uh you know why we would want visualization right why would would want that difference um and then we're going to actually get into how to actually start setting this up so we're going to get into uh simplifying the 3D models why we would want to do that um and then how to convert them uh in order to get them into the environment so we can start applying automation to them so moving right along here I am Joshua McBride and I'm a senior cpq solution architect here at K uh so I actually work on cpq uh and the implementation of it and uh all in the background and all those types of things so this is actually what I'm going to be showing today is part of what I actually do so I've got 20 years of engineering and uh automation for both engineering and Manufacturing um and then just kind of a tidbit about myself I love to travel with my family um so this is actually us camping on a beach in uh Washington uh State uh we stayed in a a few beaches and we went up through Olympic National Park this is me and the kids up early in the morning during low tide and it was uh we love to travel and it was the best trip I've literally ever had so uh yeah fun stuff there okay so about Ka so K's ultimate goal is we want to revitalize American manufacturing for a better tomorrow and so the question is is how do we how do we plan to do that right so the key is is that we want to be your partner and we want to seek to increase your efficiency and productivity through customer engagement all the way through to the manufacturing and even into service so we want to uh provide as many aspects from beginning to end as possible and so in order to do that we recognize that really the first step in this is the customer engagement and that's where we've partnered with tacton cpq um because we recognize that all the downst strring processes are ultimately fed by the interaction with the customer so if we can increase that area make it more efficient get better information all your Downstream processes will be improved as well so what is cpq it's configure price quote right we configure the product we produce an accurate price and then we can even produce a quote um automatically right and uh with tacton in particular we can provide that fully automated uh with confidence so that it can go straight to the customer so why did we choose tacton um K we are the current exclusive reseller of tacton cpq in North America and they have a uh their automation uses patented AI that was developed at the Swedish Institute of computer science so this provides um very enhanced abilities uh what we call constraint-based configuration um so we can have a open equation in essence and the configurator can still produce the solution um uh there's product design automate optimization so you can choose to have it optimized on certain factors such as price versus performance um there's interactive visualization that's what we'll be looking at today um there's augmented reality that is provided with that allowing you to see the uh product in the real world for instance if it's a you know a truck or uh you know an RV because I love RVs right then you could actually see that setting in your driveway walk around it step into it and see what it would actually be like um and then of course one of the key things is that it's easier to implement and maintain than so many of the other systems so let's get right into uh things here so last time uh we talked about CAD integration um kind of what that looks like uh an intro into how to kind of go about that so with CAD CAD being computer AED drafting the key is that it is highly accurate right dimensionally and it is a highly detailed model right so you know we want to be able to pull uh large amounts of data out of it such as a complete manufacturing bomb and for some people that may go down to the screws nuts and bolts level right uh you know and so the key here is that the cad model is intended to match the real world result as closely as possible right so to do that that takes a lot of processing power and a lot of memory not only from the file side but in the uh uh the uh uh Ram side of your computer and your uh uh you know all your processing resources right for the computer so if we compare that to product visualization on the other hand okay what we're really looking at is a live 3D model of the product based upon the user Selections in the interface now as we saw previously we can feed those user selections to CAD and automate that to get the appropriate results but the difference is is this is live so as soon as you make a selection okay you're going to get a uh result here and so uh we kind of have a example here we can uh look at okay so this is one of the available demos and so you can see as the changes are being made the visualization updates automatically so we can see that floor changed okay and we can even move into the uh into the elevator you can see make changes at to where those buttons actually set so it's interactive in order to produce the solution the desired solution for the customer right and once again it's all live and then this can even be used to uh an augmented reality and we'll see an example of this here as well so here they're going to set the truck um in the appropriate place okay so and move it here to where it's going to set on the the actual Road and then he's walking around it um we'll kind of skip forward here a little bit he'll literally look into it he can actually step into it um move back look at all the different aspects uh you know and get a uh not only a chance to look around it but get an idea of scale to see how well it's going to work in maybe the environment he's going to use it in um and then here we can see where he literally gets inside you can see the bed in the background uh and so forth so once again highly interactive but to do this this is the key to do that okay you've got to have a uh a simplified model right because in the case of augmented reality we're running it on a cell phone right so we don't have the full processing power of a dedicated uh heavyweight CAD machine okay and so why do we want to provide this though well ultimately it's easier for customers to configure the product when they have a visual that uh to give them an understanding of what they're ultimately going to receive um and this reduces uh selection errors because now they have a better understanding um and it also means that they don't have to have as good of understanding of the product to begin with this also ensures that customers can order what they want right they have a chance to to to almost interact with that product in the real world right in order to really be extra sure and confident in their order and all these things amongst any other things that I'm not going to take the time to get into today but all these things ultimately increase your sales right if they're able to see an immediate visual result that they can have confidence in um and uh that they can you know even step into and increase their confidence in your company in that product in what they've selected they're far more likely to buy from you instead of a competitor um so with that in mind well kind of you know once again compare the two CAD we've got highly detailed models that are large files and the software is heavier heavy on resources and so attempting to use this in a web browser results in it being very slow to load slow to interact um it limits the number of devices that would have the capabilities to do that and uh this often requires a powerful server in the background to feed it whereas with visualization uh you're running with this simplified representation this results in small lightweight files that's lighted on resources providing quick load times fast interactions and ultimately can be used on any device so that's what we're going to get into today okay so um let's hop over here to our uh tack on environment okay so this is the playet uh demonstration that we've seen before with the cad and so forth so we'll just step in here for those that may be new so they can see what this is we're actually going to be working with here so I'm going to go back to where we can look at our configuration you'll see the visualization is going to load here on the side and so it loads uh very quickly um and you can see even in this example we have the ability to provide Dimensions okay and we can turn those on and off um we have the uh ability to make changes so for instance Let's uh we can change it to one base I'm going to have to remove the swings to do that which is fine and so we have that immediate change we will uh let's see instead of the slide we'll change instead of this rope swing we have this rope here we can change it to climbing bars we have climbing bars on the other side let's say we just want to make that standard Okay so we're getting fast um results we can see it looks very nice right um a little more realistic looking than Cad and there's some tricks to that uh that we won't get into today but we will uh in a future um how to achieve these kinds of results but the first step in this is we've got to just get the models across um and get things set up and then we'll get into some of those tips and tricks to where we can get these uh visuals right so we're going to step out of this and go to our admin environment so uh it's not necessarily the absolute first thing you have to do we could prepare models but since we're already in this environment uh we're going to go ahead and get the information that we need out of tacton cpq so basically for us to automate and have that interaction we have to have the attributes that are in uh packed on cpq those have to be available to us in what's called viz studio uh that's where we will ultimately put everything together and uh apply the automation so to do that we're going to go to product modeling we're going to go to the product models and select our play set product model and then we have a tab for visualization we'll click that and we've already set this up but I'll go ahead and go through how to do this so the first thing is you would have to add your attributes what are the attributes that you need in order to uh automate typically there's going to be a whole lot more attributes that are used in your constraints and so forth to provide a result and all we need is the ultimate result of those so those would be the attributes that you'll add here by clicking on ADD attributes and you can see we can add them in bulk and we've needed most of these uh but you just check mark them if you need them what you need you hit okay it will ultimately add to that list and so in this case we've already added the key items that we need and we'll go ahead load the whole list here so we can see everything so I'll extend our view out to 40 items you can see these are all the attributes that uh we Invision will be utilizing we may not utilize them all that's okay if we don't uh so once we've selected all the uh attributes that we need uh we can now export this file so that we can use it in viz Studio and we'll do that by clicking this button here this is typically the the image you'll see for exporting to excel so we're going to click that and in this case it's going to give us what's called a Json file and we'll give it a name and I'm going to put it into a location to keep because I don't just want to throw it into our downloads so I'm going to go to documents I'll create a new folder and I'm going to kind of use this folder to hold all that I'm going to do in relation to visualization so in this example I'll just call it viz playset open that and we will go ahead and just keep the default name as fine for me so I'm going to save that so now I have an export of all the attributes so the next thing I'm going to go ahead and do is move to uh let's see here to this studio right here and make this full screen and so I'm G to open a project to start here and then I'm going to navigate to the folder and file that I just created so we called that uh here called that viz playset so here's our VI playet folder and there's the Json file that we just exported so I will select that and that is going to start our project um we're going to go ahead and connect that project to the cpq environment and hit okay for the license and so now we've started our project at this point so this is the main environment for this studio this is actually where you will and we'll get into later but this is where you'll put in uh the Automation and start creating automation here and you can see here on the left side we have the attributes and these are nice because it gives us a quick reference we can actually double click and it will insert it into our code base but before we create code we've got to have visual assets and those will show up here so this in essence is our 3D models and textures that we will use use or reference in order to automate so we've got to now go get those 3D models and at this point they reside in Inventor um it could be uh uh solid works um or some other uh uh CAD software uh ultimately we've just got to get it to a particular file type and in and most any of those uh pieces of software has a way to export that so we're going to go over to inventor I've got my playet here and this process that I'm going to show for simplification is going to be incredibly similar to Solid Works um some of the other programs will have similar abilities um just finding where that's at uh you know you'll have to be a little more familiar with your particular software okay so for inventor the first thing that I like to do especially in this case because we actually we have um some CAD automation connected to this right we showed that last time so with that CAD automation I can make changes right and I can update it here you can see even with my powerful computer it's still slower oh and I've got a bad constraint here uh but it's a lot slower than the visualization right um and that's because we've once again simplified that visualization so but the key here is I don't want to break this automation uh so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new representation and in fact what I'll do here is I'll actually go through that process I've obviously done this before so we'll just delete this but what we're going to do is create a new representation and what that will allow us to do is if we're going to run the iogic code then we'll run it on default and any of our work will be done on the new representation that we create so I'll create a new representation here just defaults fine click okay and let's see oh sorry that's didn't quite do that right we need cck here new sometimes when I talk I don't really pay attention to what I'm doing okay so now we've got a new representation I'm going to call it simp simplify okay so any work I do I'm going to do here I'm sure you're curious what is that work I'm going to do um it's not a whole lot but that's what we're going to get into so the key thing is we need to do a little forward thinking here as to how we're going to automate this thing so we like to think about it in pieces and we want to reuse as much as possible okay so in this case I'm just going to start with this piece here uh that's uh highlighted in red okay and this is the same piece that's used on each side if we have four of them it's the same piece now and I want to explain here we could okay we could take all four of them all at once uh but there's one issue with that if we take all four of them the other two cannot move uh separate from the first two and we need them to move separate because those two playsets uh can be further or closer together so then the question is okay well why don't I just take both of them as one object in essence the reason I don't want to do that although that would be simpler when it comes to setting up the automation in some aspects the other aspect is uh it's going to increase the amount of data that has to be sent over the internet now ultimately the resulting model would have the same number of polygons and we're actually going to be working in polygons surface modeling it would have the same number of polygons but the amount of data that has to be sent is increased and we want to keep that as low as possible um the last thing is is this part of it can change now I could do that even if I took both of them um but once again it's actually simpler if I just take one side and I don't want to take all the rest of it because they all need to operate independently as well so we kind of have to think about each object and how they need to automate and operate and uh take them in pieces so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this first base piece I'm going to right click and I'm going to isolate it uh I'll go ahead and remove the associativity which is fine because I'm in a different representation so if I needed to go back to my I logic in order to obtain another piece I go back to the default view and my I logic will operate just fine and then I can move back to my simplified view so now I've got the piece isolated that I want and I'm going to use the simplify command uh in the assembly tab so I'll click that we'll get all our options here on the left so uh there's a number of things we can do when we uh look at this we've got a lot of Curves here but I have to zoom in in order to see those curves uh We've also got holes and once again we can't see those they don't really matter to us from a visual aspect once again for a cad and Manufacturing aspect it does thus the separation between the two uh but we don't need all that uh and so that's all wasted memory as far as visualization is concerned so we want to remove that so I've got it set to remove the holes I'm going to remove all the fillets and curves I don't think we have any chamfers but I'm going to go ahead and set that to to remove chamfers um and then we can also remove objects based upon size uh and the the other key thing this will be very important later once again we won't necessarily get into this today but we will in a future KVA is we want to maintain each solid as its own body okay so we're going to end up with a single IP but it's gonna have multiple solids in it and that'll be important in two pieces we'll see one importance here in a second and another later so uh I'm good with these settings uh obviously I've you know I've run this before so my settings are already kind of good to go uh we can uh look at what that's going to result in if I highlight I can see everything that's going to be removed uh in that aspect um and if we want to see any objects that are being excluded this is all the excluded objects of course we got that because we did the isolation that was the point of that so everything looks good so I'm going to hit okay this is going to create a single IP file and that IP file has each of these as a separate body so if we look at our solid bodies we can see each object okay now I'm going to take another step here to further simplify things okay I have individual boards here but I don't need them as individual boards now once again in the visualization it looks like there's individual boards okay if I uh well wh we'll hop back over here and you know run this for a reference let me hop back in and figure okay so our visualization load here and it looks like we have individual boards right for both the roof this and uh you know all these different locations and we'll get into how to do this later but once again we got to think about these things things as we plan right and so as part of that this is actually a single solid so this is a single face and this is nothing more than a image or Texture that is placed on top of it to make it look like individual boards so by doing that I'm going to dramatically reduce the number of faces and once again reduce the memory and processing necessary for this this is one method of doing that we'll cover another method in a future cas vaa to simplify things that have complex curves such as the uh slide okay so we'll hop back here and what we're going to do is we are going to use our combine function in Inventor and we're going to select all of these and combine them into a single solid so it will give us just uh you know basically a a rectangular uh large rectangular solid okay uh so we're going to use the Boolean join command we'll hit okay and now we've got a single piece for that um there may be other objects where there might be spaces between them that you can't do that with in that case just remove them or exclude them from your simplification quickly create a new sketch and extrude it to replace that piece um and it once again it's it's worth it it makes these things operate very fast and efficiently so now I've got the piece the way I want so I need to get it out of inventor and to do that we're going to go to the export CAD format and uh we're going to use a obj file and something to keep in mind here and this is one of those things you do it one time and then it's good and you don't have to think about it again but we want to make make sure that our scale is going to operate correctly so if I go to options I'm going to make sure that my units are in inches because that is what I have set in Inventor so uh got this drop down in the way move that y'all can't see that in the way here so manage go to manage and if uh let's see uh it's not the Styles editors tool there we go document settings we go to units and we'll see it's in inches so we want to match that in our export so once again we'll go to file export CAD format we'll select the obj and I'm going to put it into that folder that I created earlier so we'll find our viz playset and we'll rename this to base and hit save so we've now exported that file so we're going to move back to our this studio and then we're going to go into our uh visual asset editor this is where we interact with the or I'm sorry I'm moving ahead here we're actually not going to go there yet we're close to that we're actually going to go to blender because we need to get this into another format and we'll actually cover uh once again in a future uh one how to use some aspects in blender to further simplify things so when you first start blender you're going to have these few objects we're just going to delete the object the light and the camera out of the scene we'll go to file import and we're going to let's see go to wavefront which is obj and navigate to our folder which is the bis playet and we're going to select the base. obj file and import it and I got to zoom out here there we go so we've now got our file in here or object I should say at this point there's nothing we're going to do on this this is as simplified as we're going to make this object once again some of the others will do some other types of prep sometimes we have to come back here um to correct some things with uh textures uh we'll cover that in a future KVA as well uh but for now we're just going to pass on through we're going to export this to a um fbx file and we're going to call it base. fbx and put that in our this playset and I'm going to put it into our visual assets folder here and Export so now I'm actually ready to go into our this studio will open the visual asset editor and give that just a second to open up here it may open up on one of my other windows actually yeah there it is so I'll expand this here and okay so here is where we're going to interact with our uh objects so the first thing I've got to do is actually import uh that object that we just created so we're going to click import asset now you can also drag and drop into here as well from Windows Explorer um and you notice it automatically opens to the visual asset folder and that's why I threw this in here so I'm going to select it I'll click open and we could import the textures I'm not concerned about that because we will be replacing those Textures in the future to make it look more realistic so I'm just going to go ahead and click import and you'll notice it brings in some uh colors in this case because it's going to have something applied but it ignored the textures that were there so with that zoom out here a little bit uh we're going to get rid of our room to see this object we're going to drag it from our asset browser up into the viewport and drop it let's see zoom out out enough here and there it is so we have our first asset now something I want to point out here and uh you know once again these will become more important later but this particular area is kind of our area where we prep the files and then once again if we're back in this environment this is where we will apply the automation so something to keep in mind here is a couple things is that one if we have this check mark here on this left side in the scene then it is going to load that object automatically okay so it will always be present in order to interact with that and basically make calls to it to for instance change uh the texture on this so that we can have those uh climbing bars and so forth then we're going to have to load this C separately so that we actually have a reference this goes with all the other objects okay so those objects will all be loaded via our code in essence but to make sure that they're all in the right place um this is kind of an area to do that because we have an XYZ here um we can scale it and so forth um we can make sure it looks the way we want with textures and things like that so this is kind of like a prep area as well and that'll be more clear when we get into actually setting up the automation that relationship and how it works uh so now that it's in here kind of that last piece is we I'll kind of give a quick introduction as to applying textures but once again we'll get more detailed in the future but in this case we've already got textures that are applied and I can double click these textures and we can change them so let's say I just for the sake of argument I want to change the color we can see that is changing on the object itself okay so I'm going to cancel that uh we have all kinds of other aspects here that once again we'll get into in a future KVA and if we want to change so I'll double click this so we can come back here if I wanted that same texture on multiple objects then I can drag it from here and I can drop it into one of these locations which this is identifying our different um uh solid models and their names actually match what is in uh let me what is in in uh or it can match I'm sorry not what is in here so if I expand this okay we've got base you can see our uh images and there's a way that we can see each solid and we can rename it and so forth we'll get into that later um I don't I don't want to get too deep right now but we can drag and drop there we can also drag and drop in to this window those textures so I can actually expand this Zoom it in okay and I could say Okay I want that as well and you'll notice here what's going to happen though is it's now affected both okay the other thing I kind of want to illustrate here is I'll click back into this environment into our scene and put that back in the corner there double clicking it and I'm going to select the object that's in the scene and then I can move that object in XYZ planes by using these and dragging or I can type into them I can hit zero you know to move it back if I want um the other way we can interact here is I can use these uh buttons and it will give me these interactive pieces here so I can just drag it and move it to wherever I want now once again this or that was rotating the view I didn't quite get the arrow right so I can move it and you can see it's having that same effect here now once again if I move this as long as I leave this check marked that's going to load automatically in that location but and I'm just giving a quick preview here and we'll be done here because I don't want to overload but we need another one of these right so the way I can get that is I'm going to move these back to z0 0o and I can drag and drop another instance in here so I have base two I'm going to make sure base two is selected and I can rotate it which in this case rotate it the wrong direction here turn that off we could turn that on and grab the green rotate it around and ultimately I want this at let's see here 0o and 180 and now it's where I need it one other thing I want to point out before we're done is which goes back to the initial setup of the inventor file you'll notice I was able to just rotate that to the the other side and it's actually in the right spot the reason is is because of the way I set up my inventor uh file so this this is actually why I missed a constraint on the uh the bridge which is why the bridge is in the wrong place so I'll have to fix that but the key is is whatever the XYZ coordinates are in the assembly that will be the XYZ coordinates in all subsequent places okay so the key is is I like to do all my simplification from the assembly I could have you uh done my simplification from the uh uh from this uh individual file I say this let me move back over there so let me okay so what I could have done is I could have said see this has its own assembly if I go into this assembly I go well I just have it right here I'll export it and then I'll have what I need my XYZ coordinates are going to be different and it's not going to match the XYZ coordinates of my assembly and so you can see the XYZ coordinates here if we look at them origin here we go okay here's my XYZ coordinates but in the assembly the XYZ coordinates are based upon the assembly itself okay so if we go back to our default here's our XYZ coordinates that way as long as I do all my exports from the assembly then everything will come in with the 0000 0 in the same spot in relation to everything else so when we export this in a future uh we export this in the future we export this in the future and Export this in the future when we drop it in to our visualization environment they will come in the right locations so that's kind of a important piece that really simplifies things so I'm not having to replace every object when I bring them in um the other thing is once again the units this the units will now match because of that unit set that we created so if I move this okay 24 in that is 24 in so I moved it 2 feet okay so these are now accurate and that way we can use that in our automation we know everything's going to come out accurately so we're going to end the the demo there this is the initial setup so the reality is is if I were to continue I'm just going to repeat this proc process for each object um there is some things that we will get into later for some of those more complex objects uh that we'll do in the surface modeling environment in a blender but once again we'll cover that in a future KVA so with that we'll um end our demonstration and so for a quick summary um you know once again we want to improve the customer interactions this ultimately increases customer satisfaction which increases sales and that's the ultimate goal so we increase sales which also results in better customer satisfaction and the reality is is all this will impact all uh Downstream processes right we're not going to have to be going back to the customers often making sure that they understand what they're getting and so forth because they've now had a visual to see what they're getting we want to be sure that we're providing lightweight models for the visualization so that it loads quickly and can be used on any device um so we talked about methods to simplify those models we'll cover even more in the future how to apply these textures to not only get uh things even more simplified but how to make it look realistic um and so forth so with that we'll uh leave it open for any questions uh that you may have okay well I'm uh not seeing any questions right now in the uh chat or anything but of course if there are any questions you can always contact us here at K you can find our uh go to our website ktiv.com ke.com you can get our number from there or uh email uh us from there as well uh or you can email me directly at joshua. McBride c.com so uh yeah we that seems to be it for today since we have no questions and we look forward to seeing you all in our future kvas