Alco Railings has applied a parametric configurator product called Paragrafix, from Paravision, to their aluminum railing product offering. Their product line is used in a broad range of residential applications throughout Canada and western United States. Alco’s goal was to make it as easy as possible for their customers to do business with them, regardless of distance. The introduction of the ProBuilt "Do It Yourself" line of railings really challenged this goal. With the Paragrafix configurator and ParaWeb, Alco has been able to not only develop a sales configuration tool but also to make this tool available over the web. Ben Hume, President of Alco Railings, Ltd. describes the benefit of the parametric configurator as follows: "faster response times to our customers’ needs with customized product information, so they can make better purchase decisions,; more accurate, optimized configurations and order processing. Add to this the ability to run the ProBuilt application over the Internet and we have an international sales automation and technical system that is a dream come true."