The Screw Conveyor Configurator
That Lives on the Open Web

After deployment

What Changed After Deployment

The old relay — sales gathers specs, engineering models, sales relays the files back — capped how many inquiries Vagen could handle in a week. Every handoff added a delay, and every quote consumed engineering hours whether the order landed or not.

For standard conveyors, that relay is gone. A customer opens the configurator, sets length, diameter, pitch, material, and inlet and outlet positions, and watches the model render. They turn it over in the embedded Forge Viewer, check the details, and take the STEP, Inventor, or PDF files — often before anyone at Vagen knows the inquiry happened.

In day-to-day terms:

• 60% of standard orders never touch the sales team. The customer configures, inspects, and downloads on their own, inquiry to deliverable.
• Sales engineers now work only the hard cases — non-standard lengths, unusual materials, multi-conveyor systems that genuinely need judgment. Better use of their expertise, and by their own account, better work.
• Lead time collapsed from 2-3 business days to same day. Outputs arrive in minutes, and a buyer nine time zones away no longer waits for the Norwegian office to open.
• Global reach grew without hiring. Time zones and language had always dragged on Vagen's international sales. A visual, self-service interface removed both: customers in Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas configure and download at any hour, no phone call required.
• Engineers got their week back. Hours once spent modeling standard conveyors for quotes now go to product development, custom projects, and extending the configurator's rule set to cover more variants.

It changed selling, too. At trade shows and customer meetings, reps hand prospects the configurator and let them build their own conveyor on the spot. Sales cycles shortened — and in a market where competitors still quote by hand, the demo itself makes the argument.

Design decisions

Why This Approach Worked

The results trace back to a handful of deliberate calls, made early.

• Public, not internal. The single biggest decision was putting the configurator in customers' hands instead of building a tool for sales. That removed the bottleneck rather than relocating it — and changed the ratio of staff effort to orders processed for good.
• Show the model before the download. Live 3D in Forge Viewer lets a customer verify the conveyor from every angle before committing. No more submitting parameters and hoping the result matches — revision rounds dropped and first-time order accuracy rose.
• Push, don't poll. Webhooks stream job status to the page as the Design Automation run progresses, and the viewer loads the moment the model is ready. Heavy server-side Inventor work ends up feeling like an app responding in real time.
• The rules never leave the server. Every parametric relationship, validation check, and BOM calculation runs behind the Design Automation API. Vagen's engineering know-how is never shipped to the browser, and a rule update deploys once, centrally, for every user at once.
• Written for non-engineers. Plain-language labels, sensible defaults, grouped parameters, and validation that blocks bad inputs before submission — nobody ever meets a cryptic Inventor error. That low floor is the reason 60% self-service was reachable at all.
• Launch small, extend deliberately. The first release covered a limited set of variants. Each automation rule proved itself against real customer orders before the catalogue widened — edge cases surfaced early, and confidence in the outputs was earned, not assumed.

Every one of these choices removed friction for someone — the customer configuring, the rep managing inquiries, the engineer maintaining rules. That's the pattern worth copying: automation that simplifies a workflow becomes indispensable; automation that adds a layer gets abandoned.