Summary
At ABB, innovation isn't just about advancing technology – it's about empowering teams to achieve more, faster, and with greater precision. Specifier, ABB’s new AI-powered tool, embodies this vision, transforming how salespeople handle specification reading to enhance productivity and deliver superior value to the customers.
The challenge
ABB wanted to improve the productivity of sales teams while providing consistent and accurate offers for their customers – faster. Specification reading is a critical yet time-consuming task, often taking up to 40-60% of the time needed to prepare a quotation. Until now, this process has been manual, leading to inefficiencies, duplicated efforts, and sometimes inconsistent offers.
With an initial solution in mind, ABB partnered with Reaktor to refine and crystalize the vision and make it a reality.
The discovery
With ABB and their sales team, we created a vision for a future workflow that allows sales experts to focus on the work that produces the most value. Our team worked with ABB experts worldwide to create solution concepts involving the end user while validating the business and technical aspects of potential solutions.
Our priority was to execute ideas that could provide immediate value and get people on board. Stakeholders from different parts of the organization evaluated the business value of the ideas. With that, we devised a plan for the bespoke tool to help reduce tedious and manual tasks from technical sales experts and bring concrete business benefits.
“This is the best tool ever created in ABB.”
Specifier not only improves the speed and accuracy of specifications reading but also simplifies life for ABB’s sales teams, allowing them to focus on delivering value to the customers.
With Specifier, ABB’s sales teams can:
- Collect and map requirements from customer documents directly to product configurations.
- Effortlessly create Clarifications and Deviations with templates and export them to Excel.
- Organize and track everything efficiently, ensuring visibility and consistency.
“Easy to learn, even easier to master.”
Document similarity detection and annotation transfer
When you upload RFQ documents, Specifier identifies if similar documents have been processed before. Experts can compare changes and easily transfer annotations to the latest specification version.
Project search
ABB’s professionals can quickly find reference projects by searching across all records using criteria like customer name or country.
AI-generated summaries
With Specifier, users can get a quick, AI-driven summary of document contents, highlighting key requirements and data in an intuitive format.
AI suggestions
Specifier offers AI-driven suggestions that users can accept, edit, or reject, continually refining its accuracy.
Efficient clarifications and deviations
When a user highlights text, the tool captures all necessary details automatically. Users can choose from templates, add attachments, and export everything to Excel for easy communication.
Looking forward, Specifier 2.0 will bring even more capabilities:
- Previewing documents and search for keywords or topics without opening each file.
- Collaborating with colleagues in real-time on projects.
- Analyzing common deviations to improve processes.
Grand One 2025 competition entry
Entry details
This solution is a competitor in the Grand One 2025 "Paras AI:n tai muun uuden teknologian käyttö" category. As the Specifier is only for ABB’s experts to use, we did not include a link to the service.
The team
Client: ABBTeam: Reaktor, ABB