In the rapidly evolving manufacturing industry, efficiency, customization, and accessibility are crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. At COOLORANGE, we are dedicated to helping manufacturing companies maximize their workflow potential with innovative software products and bespoke solutions tailored to their specific requirements. Our newest prototype leverages Autodesk’s APS (Autodesk Platform Services, previously known as Forge) Design Automation API for Inventor to provide a cloud-based product configurator that elevates design customization and accessibility to unprecedented heights.

The Problem: Customization at Scale

Manufacturers using Autodesk Inventor often face challenges when it comes to showcasing design variations and configurations to their end customers. This is especially true for build-to-order manufacturing of standardized products. Traditional workflows require specialized software installations, manual intervention, and significant time to prepare individual configurations for customers.

What if you could simplify this process, allowing your customers to interact with and configure your products directly in a web browser, without requiring Autodesk Inventor on their end? That’s exactly the problem an online product configurator solves.

Our Solution: Online Product Configurators

Our cloud-based product configurator demo, powered by Autodesk’s APS Design Automation APIs, makes it easy to upload Autodesk Inventor files and transform them into interactive, browser-based experiences for your customers. Here’s how it works: 

1. Upload: Get in touch with us and send us your Inventor assembly as a Pack-And-Go ZIP package. Our team uploads your Inventor files to our configurator platform.

2. Processing: The platform processes the files in the cloud and retrieves all configurable properties, settings and scripts required to enable dynamic configurations.

3. Visualization: End customers can access a sleek web interface, where they can interact with the designs, select configurations, specify parameters, and visualize changes - all from their browser.

4. Export: Configured designs can be exported in various formats for downstream manufacturing processes. Customers could download PDF files of your Inventor drawings or Revit files and families for downstream construction purposes.

This streamlined process empowers you to provide a superior customer experience, reduce lead times, and eliminate bottlenecks in the sales and design cycle. 

Ultimately, our prototype can be used as a foundation to build your customized version of a product configurator, that can be embedded to your own website.

Technology Stack

The product configurator demo is built using modern, industry-standard technologies to ensure scalability, security, and ease of customization: 

• Backend: .NET 8 Web Application, leveraging standard Microsoft technologies for high performance and reliability.

• Frontend: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, ensuring a lightweight and responsive user experience.

• UI Framework: Bootstrap 5 for a clean, maintainable, and easily customizable interface.

• Client-Side Scripting: jQuery, providing simple and efficient DOM manipulation and AJAX interactions.

• Web Viewer: Autodesk APS Viewer, displaying 2D and 3D model views of the configured products

• Cloud Hosting: Microsoft Azure, ensuring robust hosting with scalability, security, and high availability.

• APS Design Automation: App Bundles written in C# (.NET Framework) to extract and update the Inventor assembly parameters.

This technology stack allows for easy future enhancements and customization, making it a flexible foundation for businesses looking to integrate the configurator into their existing digital workflows.

Why APS Design Automation APIs?

The backbone of the configurator is Autodesk’s APS Design Automation API. COOLORANGE is an APS certified development partner, and we work closely with Autodesk to improve Autodesk’s and our own cloud offerings.

Cloud-based tools bring significant advantages for manufacturing companies using Autodesk Inventor:

1. Cloud-Hosted Design Automation

APS Design Automation APIs enable us to perform design automation tasks, such as modifying parameters, generating new designs, or exporting web-viewable, directly in the cloud. This eliminates the need for expensive on-premises hardware and simplifies IT management.

2. Inventor iLogic

APS Design Automation API for Inventor can leverage the iLogic-based configuration that manufacturers may have developed for their products, enabling automated design adjustments based on predefined rules. This allows to create parametric models that dynamically update according to customer-selected options.

3. Scalability and Performance

Running resource-intensive tasks, such as generating configurations or rendering 3D models, can strain local systems. With APS, these tasks are offloaded to high-performance cloud servers, ensuring faster execution times and enabling you to scale operations as your needs grow.

4. Security

APS APIs are cloud-native and don’t require opening firewall access to interact with Autodesk CAD systems. By leveraging Autodesk’s secure cloud infrastructure, APS ensures encrypted data transfer, controlled user access, and compliance with industry security standards. This minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and protects sensitive design data, making it a reliable choice for enterprise-level deployments.

5. Enhanced Accessibility

APS’ cloud capabilities make it possible to access and interact with designs from anywhere, using nothing more than a web browser. This is a game-changer for manufacturers looking to provide their customers with self-service tools for design configuration.

6. Customization and Flexibility

APS provides a robust API framework that allows developers to build highly customized applications. This means you can tailor the configurator to your specific requirements, whether it’s automating repetitive design tasks or creating bespoke customer experiences.

Why Try It Out?

By leveraging our online product configurator, you can: 

• Impress Your Customers: Deliver a modern, interactive experience that lets customers configure products in real time.

• Save Time and Resources: Automate time-consuming design tasks, freeing up your team to focus on innovation.

• Improve Collaboration: Enable seamless sharing and interaction with designs across teams, suppliers, and customers.

• Stay Competitive: Adopt cutting-edge technology that aligns with the future of manufacturing.

Get Started Today

We’re excited to invite you to try our online product configurator demo and see how it can transform your manufacturing workflows. Reach out to our team at coolOrange to learn more, schedule a demo, or discuss how we can tailor this solution to your needs.