Spotlight: Via Seating’s Spec It 3.0

We started working with Via, Inc. on their Spec It product configurator in 2017. From originally using Azure Functions and Infor CPQ to the all new version 3.0 that recently launched. Version 3.0 is what we want to focus on today. It uses the custom CPQ we built for Via as well as Laravel, Livewire, and TailwindCSS.

For version 3.0 Via tasked us with an overhaul of Spec It while keeping the existing CPQ as is. This ensured that both the live configurator and the new one we built shared the same data. This was vital for testing and so that users get the same results on both versions.

Via always provided us with project designs leaving us to focus on the development. This would allow us to bring their designs to life and Spec It 3.0 was no different. Provided to us in stages, we matched their design and were able to make it more responsive for users. The change from Vue.js to Laravel and Livewire made it easier to maintain and add functionality.

Users can generate PDFs to download or send to an email address. Because generating PDFs can take time we offloaded that functionality to a different process. This allowed us to use Ably.com to notify users when the PDFs were ready or sent.

To generate the PDFs we used Browsershot and Puppeteer to make generating the PDFs fast while also making it easy for us to add additional pages or change layouts and styles as needed. The old PDF system required very meticulously coded PDF layouts to make them work, the difference between working with the two is night and day.

This version of Spec It also introduced the concept of favorites which allows users to favorite specific products they may use often and quickly add them to a project. Speaking of projects, this is also a new feature that allows multi-item quotes and PDFs so users can have a full list of products with costs instead of having to generate individual PDFs for each product.

You can view the project at https://specit.viaseating.com/ and see the other work we’ve completed for Via in our portfolio.