InnoSale

Innovating Sales and Planning of Complex Industrial Products Exploiting Artificial Intelligence

InnoSale

The InnoSale project supports specification and quotation generation in the sales process of complex, technical systems, such as cranes and in-plant transport systems. The products considered from the perspective of a manufacturer have a complexity and variance that does not allow a complete representation of the product diversity in a catalog. Direct offers from digital product catalogs (web stores) are limited to relatively simply structured products whose combination of basic products with product options can already be validated by the sales software. More complex and customized products currently require support from sales engineers and designers (back-office support). The project results are expected to lead to a reduction in the amount of support required and a higher quality of quotations with a shorter turnaround time. As a result, a higher success rate and quantity of sales processes to be handled is expected.

In the InnoSale project, a knowledge-based system is being developed with several goals in mind. A rule-based system should also be able to validate complex combinations of basic products and product options, for which the noting and evaluation of the necessary test rules was not possible or too costly up to now. A semantic search is to be used to find documents on previous projects that correspond as closely as possible to a verbally formulated request for a component not listed in the product catalog (customer request option). Other subsystems to be developed in the project concern an AI-supported pricing and a visualization of the products.

In particular, ifak contributes to semantic search and AI-supported pricing and is the coordinator of the German subconsortium.