Discover how Bosch Rexroth’s virtual reality showroom for large machinery boosts customer engagement, increases sales, and increases market exposure.
As one of the world’s leading suppliers of drive and control technologies, Bosch Rexroth ensures efficient, powerful, and safe movement in machines and systems of any size. With its intelligent components, customized system solutions, engineering, and services, Bosch Rexroth creates the necessary environment for fully connected applications.
Bosch Rexroth’s virtual showroom enables the exploration and display of large Industrial products without the challenges of conventional real-world demonstrations. This allows them to:
“Using a virtual showroom in the Industrial Automation industry enables us to showcase products, some weighing thousands of pounds, directly to clients while demonstrating the technology. This approach facilitates a high frequency of events, leading to faster market acceptance.”
Jeff McManus, Director of Sales – Industrial Hydraulics, Bosch Rexroth
Read on to learn how the virtual showroom was created, along with what challenges it addresses.
Conventional sales enablement materials, such as slide decks and brochures, were unable to demonstrate the true value of Bosch Rexroth's large hydraulics products. Sales representatives were occasionally equipped with small demonstrator products or components, but customer engagement was limited because of the high cost of shipping, or traveling with, a full-size demonstration model.
The team was seeking a way to enable their customers to gain better insight into the products, without the need to ship large components. They knew that their customer base is the most engaged when they have the opportunity to personally experience, or “see” and “feel”, a product, rather than simply viewing printed literature or a 2D digital image. The virtual showroom provides prospects with the chance to explore products, like internal components, in detail. This is a very important factor for Bosch Rexroth’s technical customer base.
The team at Bosch Rexroth created a virtual reality application in order to provide a better sales experience and move away from 2D sales enablement materials. This virtual showroom enables their sales team to show large products inside a virtual space. Here are a few highlights of the virtual showroom:
The virtual showroom enables the display of some of the larger products in Bosch Rexroth’s portfolio. For example, a 10,000 lb (4,535 kg) manifold can be displayed and reviewed, which would be very difficult to achieve through conventional methods. Specific examples of large products displayed include some Cytro family products (such as the CytroBox and CytroMotion), an A15 VSO pump, and an AGEV1 custom hydraulic manifold.
The sales team can now focus on selling opportunities that align with go-to-market objectives, such as targeting sales for a specific product. The virtual showroom enables the sales team to prioritize which larger products to feature, and ensures that customers can experience them sooner than would be possible in real life.
In the virtual showroom, the sales teams can demonstrate the finer details of each product, by employing virtual product teardowns. These allow for a closer inspection of internal components. A full product teardown can be executed in seconds.
For Bosch Rexroth, high-quality internal components are a key selling point. The sales team can highlight the key technology in internal components quickly and effectively using the virtual breakdown function.
To reproduce such a demonstration in real life would take hours of disassembly and reassembly. In the virtual showroom, it takes less than 30 seconds.
Product demonstrations are supported by documentation available within the virtual environment.
The virtual reality environment provides customers with an extra layer of depth and enables them to thoroughly explore the product. By using the virtual showroom, in addition to conventional enablement materials, the sales team can focus on the specific features and benefits relevant to each customer.
Thanks to the portability of the virtual showroom, it is possible to get products in front of more potential customers. The virtual reality headset experience enables Bosch Rexroth to demonstrate an engaging customer experience at a greater number of trade shows and customer events. This provides the sales teams with increased opportunities for market exposure.
“The virtual showroom has significantly increased interest in our products and has successfully connected with the younger generation of engineers, bringing additional attention to the company and its offerings. This engagement has been instrumental in expanding our reach and enhancing our brand visibility.”
Jeff McManus, Director of Sales – Industrial Hydraulics, Bosch Rexroth
Products
Almost every product currently in the virtual showroom is very difficult to transport directly to a customer, due to their cost and size. The virtual showroom makes it easier and more affordable to display large products at trade shows and exhibitions. This allows the sales team to demonstrate a wider range of products to prospective customers.
Staff
Unity’s multiplayer functionality allows for remote technical support. This eliminates the need to transport staff on-site to implement and support the virtual showroom application.
For Bosch Rexroth, interacting with customers is critical. The virtual showroom is used to promote a more dynamic dialogue between the sales team and customers. The interactive nature of the experience allows for greater customer involvement compared to more conventional methods such as presentations. This approach also enables the sales team to gain a deeper understanding of each customer.
Through the virtual hands-on environment, customers are able to clearly comprehend product features, and are often inspired to come up with solutions to their product challenges. Giving them the ability to “try out” various products and features helps them feel supported in their mission. This level of interaction ensures that the customer has a good understanding of the product offering and demonstrates that the sales team can more effectively tailor their product offering to meet the customer’s needs.
The lead developer used Unity Asset Transformer Studio to process the complex Computer Aided Design (CAD) files for their large machinery products, setting them up for rapid deployment into the virtual showroom.
Process improvement
Studio allows Bosch Rexroth to include complex products in the virtual showroom, because they already exist as CAD files.
Processing the files with Studio enabled the development team to optimize the product models and ensure a smooth customer experience in the virtual showroom. Without using Studio for optimization, the high number of parts and components per product would have required manual manipulation to reduce the number of polygons and triangles, making the process very complex and time consuming.
Increased speed and efficiency
Unity Asset Transformer Studio helps optimize models in a more timely manner to provide a better customer experience. For example, the original CAD file for Bosch Rexroth’s 10,000 lb manifold product has approximately 615,000 triangles. Thanks to Studio this was reduced to 190,000 triangles and the product was ready for deployment to the virtual showroom in under one week.
“Without Unity the virtual showroom would have been almost impossible. Unity has allowed for a solo developer to create an enjoyable virtual reality experience quickly and easily. Unity’s vast support through the variety of VR packages provided makes it easy to create an interactive experience and deploy it quickly.”
Samuel Boyle, Application Engineer, Bosch Rexroth
