The manufacturer of surgical lights, booms, and tables now offers its distributors, healthcare planners, and designers a web-based configure, price, quote solution. The visual CPQ suite enables sales professionals to configure medical equipment, design accurate floor plans for specific environments, present a quote, and then invite the customer to experience the design in virtual reality.
Skytron Provides Drag-and-Drop 3D Visual Quoting and Ordering Solution to Medical Supply Distributors
Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Skytron designs and manufactures innovative and flexible solutions for the acute care market. Its medical products and integration systems are developed and designed for the OR, Hybrid Room, ER, CSSD, ICU, Labor & Delivery departments, and exam rooms.
With nearly 500 employees, the OEM of surgical lights, booms, tables, and steam sterilizers provides healthcare facilities and its clinicians with products that ensure: efficiency, versatility, reliability, and cost savings.
Skytron provides its clients with state-of-the-art, end-to-end clinical solutions that help healthcare facilities improve efficiency, reduce costs, and advance the quality of patient care.
The Need: Empower Healthcare Sales and Distribution with Visual Quoting and Ordering
With over 50 distributors worldwide, Skytron's previous visualization tool, while effective, was not easy to use and could not keep up with changes in technology and customer expectations.
Skytron recognized the need to provide its sales professionals and distributors with an interactive selling solution that:
- Visually communicates its product benefits/attributes
- Simplifies product and room configurations
- Speeds design concepts
- Ensures accurate quoting
- Enriches the engagement experience with healthcare planners and designers
"Designing safe and productive healthcare environments is a complex process and significant investment. We’re investing in technology to help healthcare teams and their key stakeholders make better, more informed decisions prior to construction and installation." - Craig Wassenaar, President at Skytron
Convey Product Attributes and Simplify Healthcare Design Configurations
To differentiate itself in the marketplace, Skytron placed an emphasis on customer experience.
Its sales reps and distributors work 1:1 with healthcare teams to plan, design, and create custom solutions with a safe, flexible, and efficient layout.
The company offers countless combinations of medical products and integration systems for hospitals and surgical centers.
A visual configurator with floor space planning and dynamic movement capabilities would shorten the time it takes to convey a concept. In addition, it would be easier for the customer to understand how the product(s) move and fit in the designed environment.
"Our boom and light equipment have multiple points of rotation and functionality. It’s paramount that we visually showcase and demonstrate how our equipment operates in their footprint." - Craig Wassenaar
During the search for a Product Configurator tool, Skytron found companies delivering half of the equation. "They were either great with visualization but not with quoting or vice versa. But Axonom showed the capabilities to provide both sides of the coin," Wassenaar adds.
Skytron selected Axonom for its ability to deliver an easy-to-use visual configuration solution designed for its sales and distributors to work closely with customers and virtually guide them through the designing, quoting, and ordering process.
Skytron Mobile VR: Experience Skytron's Hybrid Room or Operating Room in virtual reality. Download the Powertrak VR Design Viewer App and connect your smartphone into a Google Cardboard. Try it!
The Solution: Visualization and Quoting Accuracy with Powertrak 3D CPQ
Bring products and environments to life with interactive room layouts and 3D visualization.
Powertrak 3D Visual Product Configurator is a robust, end-to-end, configure-price-quote solution that empowers sales, channel partners, and customers to VISUALLY and INTERACTIVELY build and design products, generate quotes, and complete orders, quickly and accurately.
It enables Skytron and customers to strategize and co-design room layouts by placing near-realistic, 3D models of Skytron products (tables, booms, lights, storage carts), and even third-party medical equipment into the virtual environment.
When the design is complete, they can present to stakeholders for approval, generate a quote, and/or complete the order - in real-time.
The primary users will be its sales force and distributors. They will be in the field co-designing hospital room layouts with the customer - and refine the design to fit the specific need - when applicable.
Distributors Driving New Business and Revenue
Compared to its legacy tool, Skytron foresees Powertrak being more broadly adopted, easier to use, and more effective in communicating solutions to its customers. "Technology will continue to impact how we communicate complex ideas. Powertrak 3D Visual Product Configurator helps us stay up-to-date and meet the continuously increasing expectations of our customers," said Wassenaar.
The Powertrak measuring tool and perspective "point of view" features help reduce workflow inefficiencies and poor equipment placement. “Ordering products and designing spaces without seeing the products in place is not practical,” said Mike Belongie, COO at Axonom. “Successfully designing an operating room or a surgical suite layout requires maximizing space with strategic equipment placement and proper flow to ensure efficiency and safety.”
Skytron distribution partner, The RHINO Group, welcomes the change from the industry’s traditional, protracted model. “Time is money,” said Jeff Kloster, Principal Owner at The RHINO Group. “Collecting room and equipment information, and then sending it off-site for custom 3D mock-ups takes too long. The new solution streamlines that entire process. It minimizes post-construction downtime due to overlooked functional issues, and keeps our customers delivering important patient services and driving new business revenue.”
Precision Surgical, another distributor of Skytron products, leverages the 3D product configurator at design concept meetings with potential customers.
"We use the Powertrak 3D and VR to help end-users to visualize the products we have recommended they use. In one meeting, we were selected to work with a facility yielding a potential half-million dollar sale." - Robert Sariego, president at Precision Surgical.
Mr. Sariego adds, "This is a great tool to communicate concepts and designs. We once relied on CAD renditions, which took numerous meetings to obtain our objectives. Although we've used Powertrak 3D Configurator for a relatively short period of time, our success rate and our efficiency to close the deal have gone through the roof."
Immersive Virtual Reality Experience
Skytron is leading the industry with design-to-order technology that helps the customer visualize, explore, and operate products in virtual environments.
The company has now augmented that experience with both mobile and tethered virtual reality.
Wassenaar adds, "We have employed our Skytron 4D system, powered by Powertrak VRoom, at two recent trade shows and our National Sales Meeting. The ability to experience spatial relationships and easily try different locations of equipment placement in an OR helps build confidence in the final design before anything is ever put into a final specification. It saves time and money, and contributes to functional, high-performance design."
Read more from Skytron President Craig Wassenaar on the use of Virtual Reality at Medical Trade Shows.
Craig Wassenaar Interview
Immersive Virtual Reality - Experience, Explore, and Operate Medical Products In 3D Environments
*Boom and Light Images Belong to Skytron*