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PG Bison
Type
Client
Role
Year
Team
- Thierry Giles
- Paolo de Jesus
- Manoj Mannapelli
- Umair Gill
- Pedro Vilarim
Context
PG Bison Kenya is a prominent manufacturer of wood-based products, specializing in particleboard, MDF, worktops, OSB, and various furniture fittings. They play a significant role in the Kenyan construction and furniture industries.
They were looking to accelerate their order and manufacturing processes for their made-to-fit, made-to-order furniture products, in particular their kitchens. We entered into a co-creation project that would implement some of SuperDesign's 3D configurator technology to create a custom design tool that would help their trade partners create orders and connect to PG Bison's already existing manufacturing infrastructure.
Brief
1. Help with custom kitchen design.
A major challenge in custom kitchen design is the time-consuming process of determining exact client preferences. The current process for designing custom kitchens is inefficient, requiring multiple interactions between clients, designers, and sales representatives to finalize specific requirements. These requirements were often scribbled down in notes and then had to be translated into design drawings and then correct machine code in order to be fed into PG Bison's CNC machines. This would be a slow a laborious process that would sometimes include miscommunication and human error.
2. Creating a Sales tool for PG Bison Partners.
The 2nd dimension to the project involved a way to encourage partners of PG Bison to help on-sell PG Bison products. Many of PG Bison's partners are carpenters and installers of PG Bison Kitchens. Upper management wanted the configurators to help these particular partners to streamline orders directly into PG Bison factories.
Actions
We first went through a comprehensive analysis PG Bison's Kitchen product line and conducted interviews with the main stakeholders to ascertain the main product & business requirements. The goals of the business were to create a tool that would help their trade partners create custom kitchen designs and then translate orders directly into machine code for the CNC machines on their factory floor. In PG Bison's case this was into a standard CSV format to use with their current Ardis system.
3D Configurator - Less is more
As PG Bison had already experience with a Kitchen Configurator they had previously implemented, upper management had plenty of feedback regarding what they wanted to improve upon. Their previous configurator had proved cumbersome for the user, with too many options and steps required to setup the space even before getting to the kitchen configuration. We implemented a configurator where the size and shape of the room would dictate and provide the user with a 'pre-populated' design ready for further user customisation.
Customer Backend Design
In consultation with PG Bison's internal team, I lead the UX development of the backend design for the PG Bison Admin accounts as well as the UX/UI of the Partner Accounts. I mapped out the users flows and created from the ground up all the initial wireframes for 1st review.
The backend admin design allows users of the system to manage orders, quotations, saved designs, saved roomscans, partner users, customers and other system settings.
Due to local particularities of the Kenyan market place and PG's partners, we had to develop a bespoke payment workflow for split invoicing and offline bank transfers until their online payment gateways were ready to be rolled out.
Product Design
This process involved balancing the needs to the different stake holders in the system. As this was a co-creation project with SuperDesign and the development of our SASS platform, I needed to be cognisant of the wider goals of not only PG Bison's customers and partners but also of the white label SASS product that we were developing in house.
Outcomes
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Following a successful presentation to the Directors of PG Bison Kenya, we were able to secure the continuation of the project for further testing with internal PG Bison Sales/and Design teams as well as the interest of their parent company - PG Bison South Africa. The project is still undergoing internal testing with the PG Team with expected rollout to Partners thereafter.
As a result we were invited to present our technology to the board of the much larger company, whose business model and requirements were very different to PG Bison Kenya.