Lagafors is a world-leading company that manufactures cleaning equipment for the food industry. They invest significantly in both sustainability and digitalization, and over the years, Meta Bytes has assisted in several projects to streamline their operations. Among these projects, we have developed an app that has significantly simplified and streamlined workflows for their service technicians.
Lagafors has its headquarters in Laholm, and the company’s owners were named "Entrepreneurs of the Year" in Laholm in 2023, primarily due to their leadership and the strong financial performance they demonstrated.
Lagafors already had a product configurator that they wanted to update with new features to maximize its functionality. The tool is software that allows customization and configuration of a product according to specific customer requirements. The configurator is used in the sales process to provide an estimate of the total cost during customer meetings. Lagafors' sales representatives can also demonstrate how long it takes for the investment to pay off.
Product configurators are often used for complex products where numerous factors influence the final result, including price. In Lagafors' case, these factors include water consumption, number of janitors, and the type of food being handled.
The changes Lagafors wanted to make to their existing configurator included various aspects related to the overall view and document generation. Additionally, it needed to be improved and expanded to be able to be used globally. Their list of requirements exceeded 45 points with both "must-have" and "should-have" features.
Given the relatively extensive changes, we made a joint decision to develop an entirely new solution inspired by the old configurator. This approach allowed us to build a PIM (Product Information Management) system to store and maintain all product information. A PIM system enables the standardization and normalization of all product information and updates, automatically transferring them to other applications integrated with the system.
Angelica Kristiansson, Project Manager at Lagafors:
Thanks to the PIM system, if we change an image in one place, it is updated everywhere, saving us an incredible amount of time and also minimizes the risk of errors occurring.
In Lagafors' case, we created an integration between the product configurator and the PIM system, ensuring that correct and updated information is always available to the sales representatives using the configurator.
Technology used:
Backend: Go
Frontend: React
Cloud: AWS and Terraform
Lagafors now has an even better and more comprehensive tool that streamlines and simplifies the daily work of its sales representatives. Just like before, they can quickly generate a price proposal and present it to their customers, something they use at events such as trade shows. They can also show a comparison of the customer's current costs and how much they would save by using Lagafors' products instead.
The additional features make the tool even better, and the new solution is more tailored to Lagafors' international operations. The PIM system we developed alongside the configurator will in the future be integrated with Lagafors' website and product catalogue. As a result, product information only needs to be entered into the system and will automatically transfer to all other applications.
The solution configurator, as we have chosen to call it since Lagafors sells complete cleaning solutions rather than individual products, is currently used by the company's sales representatives in Sweden and Germany. The next step is to roll it out globally within the company, including to Lagafors' distributors. In the future, it will also be possible to have different types of users in the system.
