Valin Company Background
Who is Valin?
Valin Corporation is the leading technical solutions provider for the technology, energy, life sciences natural resources, and transportation industries. For over 45 years, Valin has helped companies optimize their automation, fluid management, precision measurement, process heating, and filtration systems.
Valin has risen to the top of its industry through personalized order management, on-site field support, comprehensive training, and applied expert engineering services. Recently, the Silicon Valley Business Journal recognized Valin as the 34th Largest Private Company in Silicon Valley and ranked 49th on Industrial Distribution’s Big 50 List.
What Does Valin Do?
Valin is a leading distributor of automation, filtration, fluid handling, heating, and process control products and systems for numerous industrial applications that demand high purity. It represents the best manufacturers and offers comprehensive solutions for a range of process markets that span sectors, including technology, life sciences, energy, and transportation.
Valin’s team of specialized industry experts comprises professional engineers with advanced engineering degrees, collectively holding over 150 years of expertise in process heating, controls and automation valves, instrumentation, filtration, and motion control applications. For over 45 years, the company has helped thousands of companies solve their most demanding operations challenges.
Project Background
Business Need
This leader in solving big problems needed an interactive way to enable their sales reps and customers to configure solution estimates in less time than the lengthy quotation process they currently used. The processes its customers need to configure solutions for are often complex, so the task of shortening the time it takes to build an estimate was a tough problem to solve.
They needed a configurator that’s interactive like a product is there on the spot.
The complexity of these products often makes it impossible to show customers what the result will look like, creating a tough sales situation. Valin needed to develop methodologies and sales practices that could demo models of the product integration they were proposing without confusing the customer, all while providing an idea of the final cost.
What made the most sense was custom software development that could help deliver a high-resolution 3D example of their products right inside the organization they were designing for. This could allow them to build estimates in real-time.
Software applications drive this type of mixed reality sales tool, transferring massive amounts of data across the globe to display a computer-generated image in front of sales prospects.
This type of sales tool could provide access to envisioning the product’s value in 3D and help the customer gain additional knowledge regarding quality and functionality.
Approach
We ran strategy meetings with industry experts and leaders from several divisions within Valin to build an effective and scalable augmented reality sales system. We helped define numerous challenges and sales needs for specific product lines.
For starters, we needed to implement a 3D experience rather than augmented reality or virtual reality, which closes off the vision to the user’s environment. This could be risky in large industrial environments where safety is the top priority.
Valin also didn’t want any type of AR headsets to be necessary. It was important that simple, ubiquitous mobile devices were the only hardware required to run the 3D technology. Being able to help buyers learn about products without needing a VR headset is one of the leading benefits of an augmented reality system or 3D experience.
Unlike VR, which uses virtual reality headsets and software to trick users into thinking they’re somewhere else completely, AR uses a mobile device as a window to their current place but with additional objects. Similarly, 3D visual tools also help users see products as if they are right in front of them.
This was just the kind of sales tool Valin needed to deliver immersive visual presentations to organizations without needing special and costly viewing devices.
Solution
After running through the potential sales scenarios, we landed on using Surface Pros, enabling users to view the details of a product as if it were in front of them. This way, all the users needed to do was view the products on the devices to configure their complete cost estimates.
The custom software displayed the product and gave the customers lots of options to choose from that would calculate performance and cost in realtime. As a result, sales teams could now use simple apps to support sharing their product knowledge with their customers.
The creation of the interactive Surface Pro application leveraged our custom application development services. Our team of developers worked with Valin throughout the development process to ensure the custom software would deliver the business results they sought at a cost they could afford.
Outcome
The 3D application could simulate the physical product for prospects, drastically reducing lengthy estimation times down to only hours or days. Customers were able to create custom solutions using the software to determine each line item they needed in the deal. Additional product specs could be easily included in the view as well.
The application allowed customers and employees to configure custom product solutions from various components and generate estimates. Providing a complete sales experience for prospects is one of the top benefits of using augmented reality in a sales system. Reach out to Laminar to learn how we can help you land more sales of complex products from all over the world.
How Can Laminar Help You?
Whether you need an augmented reality sales system or to connect your computers, so your entire organization is working in the secure cloud, Laminar can help. Custom software must be developed to enable high-resolution displays of products and create an immersive and rich 3D experience.
Our augmented reality development team helps you get all the functionality you’re looking for in your 3D sales apps, empowering prospects to see virtual objects right before their eyes in real-time.
When you need help developing 3D technology, reach out to Laminar Consulting for the best 3D and AR developers available. Whether your prospects are using mobile devices, wearing heads-up displays, AR headsets, or virtual reality headsets, Laminar can help you provide a mixed reality experience that delivers sales. Contact us today to learn more.