Sector Chemical and mechanical pulping
Company Valmet Technologies Oy / Valmet
Employees 17,500 (in the group)
Major challenges
- Standardization of product offering by creating a "product shelf"
- Simplification and streamlining of the quote process
- Parallel work between product areas in the quote process
- Creation of quote data in different systems
Vice President - Process Automation at Valmet
Tomas Edström
Combinum CPQ simplifies and streamlines the quote process. It controls the sales process by selecting solutions from our product shelf.
Combinum helps us to harmonize our way of working globally in the sales process.
The company
Valmet
Valmet is a Finnish industry group that was reborn through the demerger of the pulp, paper and power businesses from Metso Group in December 2013. Today, the group has over 17 500 employees spread over more than 40 countries.
Valmet manufactures and sells intelligent production lines for the global pulping and fiber industry. The complete process from log to packaged pulp bales is covered.
Within the area Baling Systems (pulp bale management) Valmet was an early adaptor of configurators and they substituted their first configurator salesPLUS in favor of Combinum in 2008.
Within the Fiber area, which is significantly larger, Metso has been working actively with modularization and created common work methods in the quote process within the different product areas, such as Woodhandling, Cooking and Fiberline. Recently, they were ready to take the step into a configurator for the complete process and once again, the choice was Combinum.
The project
Challenges
The product offering was not ready to fit into a configurator, but needed modularization and standardization. An extra challenge was the huge amount of related product data. Consider making a quote for a complete pulp industry with all machinery and processes.
Quotes often need to include several different types of production lines which require expertise from different product areas within Valmet.
The CPQ system needs to work in an integrated manner with systems for flow sheet building and site management.
The project
Solutions
Within every product area, an extensive modularization work has been done to define how the production lines can be configured. Examples of production lines are Cooking, Fiberline and Pulp Drying.
The production lines have been divided into module layouts which in turn consist of a number of positions. In a position, a set of modules can be selected. A module is usually some kind of machine, such as a pump or a heat exchanger.
Each module is configurable and is therefore modeled as a product in Combinum with an associated item structure. As of today, close to 2 000 configurable products are managed – each with its own set of parameters, rules and items. We’re talking about a lot of product data and large quotes consisting of a tree with configurations and child configurations.
Import functions from Excel are used to simplify and streamline the input of large quantities of data. Imported products, parameters and items are completed in the modelling tool, Combinum Architect, with the required set of rules.
Reports have been designed to auto-generate a set of documents and lists for the quotes. In the reports, configuration data is combined with rule controlled texts and standard texts. Valmet's standard document layout is applied to the reports.
Integrations have been built to a flow sheet builder and to the site management system SiteBase® to feed them with configuration data.
In the scope of a quote, the user can also include alternatives and options and configure these as desired. Alternatives and options are tagged so that they can be separated from the main offering in reports and to other systems fed by the configurator.