Floor Plan to Proposal
Replaced the customer proposal document consultants assembled by hand in Excel with one the PMT generates: a branded, room-by-room PDF (about 1.5 hours down to about 15 minutes, estimated). Then gave them an editor to place every device on the plan themselves.
- Role
- Built the editor, proposal output and sales-order editor; backend changes by an AHA developer
- Status
- SHIPPED
- Stack
- MongoDB, PDF generation, Canvas editing
- 1. Draw the rooms on the floor plan
- 2. Place devices; the bill of materials fills in
- 3. Download the New Proposal with HA
- 4. After onboarding: move a device from the sales order
The gap I spotted
Consultants were spending about 1.5 hours assembling each customer proposal document by hand in Excel. I asked why that could not take minutes with a tool, and built one. Then I saw every device being placed twice, once by the consultant and again by the project manager, and gave consultants the editor.
The problem
Can a consultant build a priced, room-by-room proposal and the device plan in one place, so the data reaching project managers is already right?
Consultants put together the customer proposal document by hand in Excel, copying from old ones: about 1.5 to 2 hours each, with lost data and mismatched device prices. Project managers then re-placed every device on the electrical plan by hand, and because consultants and PMs work from different offices, devices sometimes landed in the wrong spot, like a keypad on the wrong side of the sofa.
The system
- Build: proposal creation in the PMT. Add devices and device groups (for example under-bed lighting: a presence sensor and an LED strip), with every proposal stored in MongoDB instead of Excel.
- Plan: a canvas HA Editor. Upload the electrical plan and draw a room boundary (rectangle or polygon, with right-angle assistance); a pop-up asks whether to pinpoint each device one by one, or to spread the room’s devices inside the boundary. Then move, rotate and resize them, or redraw the room. Undo/redo and auto-save.
- Price: room and device data sync both ways with the proposal tool, including programming fees, discounts and floor totals.
- Propose: "New Proposal with HA" generates the customer document from that data: a branded cover, why AHA and track record, commercials with each room's total, payment milestones, a page per room with product codes, unit prices and quantities and a cropped plan of that room right after its prices (so the customer sees them side by side instead of flipping to a drawing at the end), then warranty and scope, terms, next steps and the HA drawing. Also available as PDF, image or room-wise from the Quotation Manager.
- After onboarding: moving a device used to mean finding the HA plan, opening Edit HA, going into rooms and moving it there. Now a tab on the sales order crops the plan by room boundary, so the device is moved and saved right there; only the changed icons are saved, with a check for edits made elsewhere.
- 01
Floor plan upload
- 02
HA Editor: rooms + devices
- 03
Pricing synced with the proposal tool
- 04
New Proposal with HA (PDF)
- 05
Onboarding: sales order created
- 06
Sales order room editor: move devices
Engineering decisions
- Rectangles and free polygons, with right-angle assistance
- Real homes have irregular rooms, and the assistance keeps drawn walls square.
- Devices stay tied to their room
- Positions stay consistent when a room’s boundary is redrawn, and devices can be viewed room by room.
- Product photos in the proposal instead of plan icons
- Technical icons suit the plan; a customer understands product images. Each room gets its own cropped section of the plan.
- One set of room and device data for the editor and the proposal
- What the consultant draws and what the customer is quoted can’t drift apart.
Evaluation
- I demoed the editor to the consultant team, and it changed with their feedback.
What changed
- Proposal formatting updated from feedback.
- Device placement made faster: pick a device image, place it, and move, rotate or resize several at once.
Impact
A proposal now takes about 15 minutes instead of about 1.5 hours (an estimate), from one source of device data and prices. Consultants place the devices themselves, so what reaches project managers after onboarding is already correct, with far less back-and-forth between offices. I demoed the editor to the consultant team. A WebP vs JPG test on real proposals (13.9 MB vs 12.6 MB) kept product photos as JPG.
AHA Smart Homes screens on this site are recreated with dummy data.
Want to talk through how I built this?
I'm happy to walk through the decisions, what failed and what I'd change.