🏆 This project is the winner of the Smart Business challenge set at the 2023 Smart Cities Hackathon hosted by Seneca Polytechnic
Urban Ease is a B2B product quotation webtool designed to make the whole quotation process simpler, easier and faster for all stakeholders involved.
If you are a city planner looking to get quotes online for your project, you have to go through some steps.
- Research and look through arrays of products to find the right ones for your project.
- After researching for hours, you have finally found the perfect product. But now, you are asked to fill a long inquiry form with your information.
- After all of these steps? You are left to wait an unknown amount of time to get a response back from the business.
We solve this problem by 3 features of our product.
If you are a user, you would want things that you need and use the most recommended more to you. For example, a public space designer would not be bombarded with information about building sensors.
We created an AI powered production recommendation feature that takes input from the user and outputs products that are recommended for the situation that the user is describing.
For example, if you type in "I want smoke detectors for my school", the AI is smart enough to detect keywords from the input and compare it against the products existing in the database. From this, it will present a list of products related to the senario provided.
We want users of any level to come to our tool and get quotes without any difficulty. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional who knows all the product names or a retailer who’s just looking to buy common products, it should be easy and accessible to get a quotation.
Our feature is called “Pathways”. A pathway is a user journey, a step-by-step module that’s easy to follow for the user.
If someone is building fiarm alarm control unit, they are multiple things that you need to buy together. Pathways provide the user with a clear visualization of what they need and they can easily add it to the cart.
Part of our problem is that it is not that simple to get quotations for businesses. In a multi level company, getting a quotation involves getting approvals from the manager. For example, an employee would need approvals from their managers and superiors before they finalize on the product. This makes it even more time consuming.
We want our users to be able to share carts, incorporating collaboration within the organization. This significantly reduces the processing time when getting a quote. You can do all apporvals in one place.
The user has the ability to decide whether the collaborator will have view only or moderator access. Once the cart is all set and ready, the users can share the cart with their seniors for approvals and also place an order for the products from there.
