Through the CDTI aid program for R&D projects, the INNOSALE project aims to innovate in the sales and planning processes of complex industrial products, exploiting Artificial Intelligence.
InnoSale aims to innovate, through the application of the Artificial Intelligence, the systems and processes of current sales for complex and variable industrial equipment, plants and services, which currently require time-consuming administrative support to the industry.
The characteristics of these products make this task fundamentally different from selling products that can be easily selected in an online store system (for example, on Amazon, Zalando or eBay), as they have a complexity and variation that do not allow a complete representation in a catalog. The percentage of offers that require administrative support by experienced sales engineers within the domains addressed by InnoSale ranges from 65% to 100%.
InnoSale aims to develop methods to increase the expressiveness of validation rules and suggest relevant purchase options (case-based reasoning). In this way, sales engineers will be supported to quickly find customer requests and previous orders and other solutions, as well as to identify similarities between customers (evolutionary grouping). The user experience will be improved thanks to the combination of deep learning systems with augmented reality techniques, 3D modeling and 3D printing.
Therefore, thanks to the improvement and application of multiple artificial intelligence technologies, Innosale will enable innovations towards:
- semantic transformation automated cross-domain-specific vocabularies used by customers and manufacturers (ontology-based creation of custom product configurations).
- Understandable system behavior based on declarative rules of engineers or even learned by algorithms.
- Identification of similarities with requests, offers or projects from previous clients by searching various heterogeneous data sources, such as ERP, CRM, CAD systems and others.
- Efficient generation of specifications or models for various product alternatives and presentations using 3D-enabled technologies.
- Principle-based scientific methods for estimating optimal prices, considering various customers and domain-specific challenges, regional criteria, and producer production capabilities.
These proposed solutions focus on cut sales process processing time in half, increasing by more than 50% the number of purchases made by the customer without the support of sales engineers. The personal support time required for less complex offers will be reduced, allowing sales engineers to focus on inquiries, which means quotes are delivered faster, with higher quality and with a better "hit rate" (ratio between inquiries and orders). Industry partners will therefore benefit from an increase in sales and the number of satisfied customers.
The InnoSale consortium is represented by 28 partners from 5 European countries, including key players like PI MAKINA, KONECRANES, DEMAG, PH ENERGIA, PAPELEIRA, MOLOK, and complemented by software developers like Software AG, WAPICE, ADESSO, CLOUDCRAZY, engineering methods like AG, NIMBEO, MOVERY, PANEL SISTEMAS, VECTOR, SOTEC, TARAKOS, IOTIQ, FROSMO, LEADDESK) and innovative start-ups such as NATIF, all with experience in the development of industrial methods of software and Artificial Intelligence. Scientific foundations and innovations are addressed with informatics and AI research partners, such as TUD/ScaDS.AI, VTT, ISEP, IFAK, UC3M, DAKIK.
From Panel We will play an important role in this project, which will be appreciated mainly in two areas:
- The development of an innovative system of matchmaking based clustering y Deep Learning, which will allow collaboration in Innosale's main objective, which is to improve the complex sales process. Through this system, the user will be able to locate digital products that are of interest to him through an advanced system for collecting, processing, analyzing, and searching for information.
- La participation in the use case of the Energy sector, which aims to improve the sale of digital products and services in the energy market. This market has made notable progress in recent years with regard to its infrastructure and digital management, however, the sales process is not as advanced: the customer still needs to manage their rates with an operator, and they are not offered all the options that the underlying technology allows. For this reason, the application of the system proposed in the previous point will improve the user's options in terms of the products to which they have access, and their alternatives to choose from within the extensive number of possibilities that have been generated thanks to the existence of the Smart grid.
The INNOSALE project has a term of duration from October 2021 to September 2024.
