Digital Sales & Configuration System

Overview

Response Shelter was built from a standardised 1200 × 2400 mm component vocabulary — a logic that made the physical building system economical also created an opportunity to simplify how it was sold. The brief was to let field sales personnel configure a customer's building requirement, turn that configuration into an estimate or offer, and connect the resulting record to the company's master CRM and ERP systems, rather than letting it live as an isolated paper quote.

The system was intended for the Philippines and the wider Asian market, which set the real constraint. It could not assume European office infrastructure, fixed broadband, desktop computers, or high-specification handsets. Sales activity happened remotely, connectivity was often limited to GSM networks with narrow available bandwidth, and simple smartphones were the operating environment — while commercial and customer data still required secure access to central company systems. The technical solution had to hold all of this at once: low bandwidth, GSM connectivity, modest devices, distributed users, and secure remote access to enterprise systems.

The resulting architecture followed a single flow: customer requirement, building configuration, component requirement, estimate or offer, CRM/ERP. The configurator itself was understood as an extension of the modular product, not a separate piece of software — a salesperson assembled a proposed building from the same standard component vocabulary used on site, and that assembly translated directly into the bill of components and pricing structure needed to produce a commercial offer.

Connectivity was designed around the infrastructure that actually existed where the system needed to run, not around infrastructure GRAY wished existed. Secure access relied on VPN and SSL VPN tunnels; SMS and MMS carried supplementary communication appropriate to GSM networks and the devices of the period. None of this assumed always-on broadband, native applications, or cloud platforms in the sense those terms carry today — the design decision that mattered was making the system fit the network, not the other way round.

GRAY's role was to integrate five layers that are usually designed in isolation: product logic (the 1200 × 2400 mm construction system), sales logic (turning a requirement into a configured building and a commercial proposition), information logic (translating that configuration into component, estimating and customer data), enterprise logic (connecting field activity to the master CRM/ERP environment), and communications logic (moving that information securely over a constrained mobile network). This is not, at its core, a story about an interface — it is a story about designing an operational system around the real conditions of its market.

The finished system demonstrated that technological sophistication does not require technological complexity. It was sophisticated precisely because every layer — device, network, workflow, and enterprise integration — was matched to the conditions in which it actually had to operate, giving field sales the same disciplined, modular logic that made the physical building system work in the first place.