Industry Project 2024/2025: ABB
The IDBM Industry Project Course is a seven-month journey of collaboration, exploration, and innovation, where students addressing real-world challenges in collaboration with our industry partners. This year, we’re inviting you to follow 10 different stories as our teams move through different stages of their project journeys.
How do you turn a long, dense customer specification into an accurate quote, when the knowledge you need is spread across teams, countries and systems?
That was the question our team explored with ABB, a global technology leader in electrification and automation. In ABB’s motion business, engineers receive detailed technical specifications from customers and must work out exactly which motors and configurations meet them, often under tight deadlines and across organizational boundaries.
When a customer requests a quotation, someone has to read the specification, identify every requirement that matters, and check it against products, standards and regulations. Much of this work is manual, and the answers to difficult questions often live in inboxes and in the heads of experienced colleagues. ABB was developing an internal tool to support this work, and our task was to understand the people who would use it, find out where it could make the biggest difference and how we could evolve the tool overall.
So, we started where the work happens. We interviewed specification readers, sales engineers and support teams all over the world including our Industry Project trip to Singapore and watched them work through real cases on their own screens. One of our huge realizations was how differently the Singaporean attitude towards adopting new tools differed from the Finnish attitude. We then analyzed every interview together as a team, turning dozens of conversations and hours of transcript into a clear set of recurring themes.
The picture that emerged was less about any single tool and more about the space between them. Becoming a confident specification reader takes years, a great deal of know-how is shared person to person rather than written down and collaborating across business lines is harder than it looks from the outside. The engineers were not asking for more software. They wanted the right information at the right moment, and a record of what had already been decided.
Little India Chai, a must have. Our team in one of the most luxurious places in Singapore. The whole team grinding.
Our recommendations focused on reframing how the tool was used, currently it was only internal, what if we instead gave access to the tool directly to the customer? It would be a platform any customer could upload their specification to and with the assistance of AI, it could immediately show quotations as long as they were not too specific (so specific that a similar quotation doesn’t exist). We presented at the 2025 Impact Gala and later on also internally to the company. The feedback in both settings was very positive, and the clearest sign of it came soon after: ABB offered our team positions for the summer to continue the work, turning our concepts into tested prototypes and presenting the final feature set to senior management.
Working with a global engineering company taught us that good design in a technical domain starts with listening to experts before proposing or prototyping anything. We came in as five students from different disciplines and left as a team that is still close today with almost biweekly meetups and dinners, and with solutions the people using them had asked for.
The team:
Umberto Binello (ARTS)
Karim Kanji (TECH)
Mila Lakkapää (TECH)
Rommo Shams (BIZ)
Katerina Tchilinguirov (ARTS)
