The tender support system

摘要

This paper reports on a project in which an expert system (the Tender Support System, TSS) is developed and put to use to support sales engineers to create tenders about industrial centrifugal pumps. From a knowledge management perspective, the project goal was to initiate a continuous transfer of know-how about pumps to the individual sales engineer in a manner that supports the latter to quickly generate and explore technically valid pump configurations as a response to customer requirements. The project was successfully realised through a joint effort between Sulzer Pumps, a multinational manufacturing pumps, and Bolesian, a knowledge technology company. We focus on the TSS architecture and success factors of this project.