Configura Announces Dates, Location and Keynotes for the 11th Annual CET Designer User & Developer Conference
Configura, maker of CET Designer software, will hold its 11th annual CET Designer User & Developer Conference Oct. 17-18 at Devos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Welcome events are slated for the evening of Oct. 16. The keynote speaker will be Karl Johan Bertilsson, creative director of Stockholm-based NCS Colour®©, a global provider of color communication solutions. The second-day speaker will be Amanda Schneider, founder of Chicago-based Contract Consulting Group.
Configura anticipates nearly 500 people – interior designers, dealer principals, material handling engineers, software developers and representatives from leading global manufacturers – at the event that has become a tradition in the CET Designer community.
“We love hosting the conference in Grand Rapids – also known as Furniture City – because it gives some of our contract furniture users a chance to travel to their manufacturer’s headquarters as well as attend the conference,” Configura Vice President of Global Customer Experience Tracy Lanning said.
The annual conference is a blend of educational sessions led by CET Designer “power users,” manufacturers, industry leaders and Configura team members. New to the conference this year will be hands-on CET Designer workshops.The conference also includes events designed for networking and fun.
Keynote speaker Karl Johan Bertilsson will present Colour & Colour Trends. He’ll talk about the importance of color management in design and how to work with its challenges. NCS – Natural Colour System®© is a global standard for the definition, quality assurance and communication of color trends in interior design. Bertilsson has worked with color for the past 18 years. As creative director of NCS Colour®©, he’s helped global corporations, universities and creative studios in over 80 countries with their color strategies.
Contract Consulting Group Founder Amanda Schneider, LEED AP, is the day-two speaker at this year’s conference. A product designer with an MBA in marketing, she has studied the contract interiors market as a designer, researcher and journalist for two decades. Schneider’s passion is sharing observations on current industry changes to drive process innovation.
Previous CET Designer User & Developer Conferences have featured such notable keynote speakers as Contract magazine Designers of the Year Suzette Subance Ferrier, Joey Shimoda and Primo Orpilla; renowned color expert Laura Guido-Clark who founded Project Color Corps™; Design the Life You Love author and product designer Ayse Birsel; 2016 Interior Design magazine Hall of Fame inductee Cheryl Durst, who is executive vice president and chief executive officer of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA); American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer Randy Fiser; and Debbie Millman, host of the radio show and podcast Design Matters.
Allsteel Technology Communication Specialist Kaylie Tucker has attended past user conferences as a dealer-designer and also as a Configura Application Partner.
“At my first user conference, it was great to see an entire network of other designers that shared in my love for CET Designer. After that, I was hooked. I kept attending because of the networking and endless amounts of knowledge that I could take away with me. There are so many topics and takeaways, whether it’s how you transition into using CET Designer fulltime, or how to increase the quality of your renderings. Regardless, my time at the conference is never wasted,” Tucker says.
Configura began holding user conferences over a decade ago to serve a small but growing CET Designer user base in North America. Today, more than 11,000 people around the globe use Configura’s software, with users in the commercial furniture, kitchen and bath, material handling, industrial machinery, and laboratory and health care industries.
“Although we are a global company expanding across multiple industries, our conference allows us to connect personally with our partners, developers and users,” says Configura CEO Johan Lyreborn. “We want to continue to grow our CET Designer community and ecosystem, and what better way to do it than by bringing everyone together.”
During NeoCon, Configura will open “early bird” registration for discounted pricing ($550) to the conference. Attendees also will have the chance to win a free registration, a $575 value. The winning name will be drawn during NeoCon on Wednesday, June 13, at 11 a.m. in Configura’s NeoCon booth. (Entrants need not be present to win. Some restrictions apply.)
Configura will announce the full speaker lineup this summer.
People can learn more and get a flavor for past user conferences at www.configura.com/userconference.
All CET Designer users, developers and partners are welcome to attend. Online registration details will be announced soon.
About Configura
Configura creates intelligent space-planning software for manufacturers, dealers and designers in the Contract Furniture, Kitchen and Bath, Material Handling, Industrial Machinery, and Laboratory and Healthcare industries. The company’s software products, including CET Designer, are used by more than 11,000 people around the world. Configura Sverige AB, the parent company, is headquartered in Linköping, Sweden, with commercial operations in Gothenburg, Sweden; Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Shenzhen, China. Founded in 1990, Configura is privately owned with over 160 employees worldwide and annual sales of more than $18 million USD. More information at www.configura.com.
About CET Designer
Based on technology created by Configura, CET Designer is intelligent, highly visual and intuitive space-planning software that simplifies specifying and selling of products in a variety of industries. It’s a complete solution that quickly and accurately handles every step of the sales and order process. In CET Designer, components that represent manufacturers’ products look and behave like actual products. Users drag and drop components into 2D and 3D virtual environments; behind the scenes, the software tracks components, calculates pricing and prevents user errors. Users can create and generate layouts, quotes, photorealistic renderings, movies, installation drawings, reconfigurations and bills of materials – in other words, everything needed to propose on work and place orders. CET Designer is the future of space planning. More information at www.configura.com/cet.
