KONE – Fast

FAST is a web application specifically designed and implemented to allow the commercial network of the Service division of KONE Italia Spa to prepare offers quickly for the repair, modernisation and replacement of lifts, moving walks and automatic doors.

The commercial activity connected to the lift repair and modernisation requires an intense activity of condition evaluation and an engineering phase of the suggested solution. Without the assistance of a suitable software tool, a sales manager is compelled to use voluminous paper cost and price lists that often are not enough informative about the technical constraints of each solution component. The result is an enormous waste of time during the offer preparation phase, with a high risk of making mistakes that will occur only during the installation and, consequently, a costs increase and an operating margin worsening.

 Over time FAST, operating since 2003, has solved all these problems integrating in a single software platform:

• smart configurators for the most common modernisation and repair solutions of lifts, escalators,
  moving walks and building doors. Each configurator guarantees a correct selection of the components of a solution and it calculates the material costs, the necessary assembling labour hours and the offer price;
• configurators to define and quote complete systems to be installed in buildings without lifts or to
  replace existing systems;
• configurators to quote lift, escalator and moving walk maintenance contracts;
• integration with the data warehouse (SQL Server), the CRM (Sales Force) and the ERP of KONE;
• validation and approval workflow focused on the commercial staff performance and based on the
  company’s standards;
• generation, thanks to the integration with K-DOC, of the offer document to be presented to a
  Customer and of all technical, commercial and regulatory attachments that are necessary for the
  completion of the consecutive order acquisition process;
• reports.

Thanks to all of this, a salesperson can make a medium complexity offer in less than 5 minutes!
The key success factor of this tool, still used by KONE Italia, is the implementation of a XML-based standard methodology for the setup of the configurators used by the system, regarding not only the data structure but also the business logic and the calculation. In this way, it has been possible to easily adapt the platform to the new market needs, products and services and to the new management logic.