How Zurn Modernized with AI

For engineers working on municipal or commercial water systems, specifying the right plumbing product often meant manually combing through hundreds of pages of codes, water safety classifications, and product catalogs. This analog process made it difficult to match application needs to the right manufacturer—unless that brand was already top-of-mind or pre-specified.

Zurn Elkay Water Solutions saw an opportunity: streamline the specification process, increase product visibility, and empower engineers to select compliant products with confidence.

Water system engineers often rely on technical guidance from manufacturer Application Engineers to ensure compliance with local specifications. For Zurn, this created two problems:

• Bottlenecks: Manual review of documents slowed down the specification and sales cycle.
• Visibility Gaps: Zurn’s products were often overlooked if not already pre-listed by engineers, even when they were a better technical fit.

Zurn needed a scalable solution to improve accuracy, reduce friction, and grow adoption of its highly engineered plumbing systems, which included:

• Backflow prevention devices
• Pressure-reducing valves
• Automatic control valves
• Temperature and mixing valves (TMVs)
• Fire suppression solutions

To eliminate the guesswork and reduce the manual lift, Zurn leveraged our expertise in this application to develop a self-service, AI-assisted online specification tool. The system enabled engineers to generate accurate product recommendations in minutes by answering a series of guided questions.

Key elements of the solution included:

• Decision-Tree Logic & Hazard Classification
  • Users were guided through a series of questions about application type, flow rate, hazard level, and building type—mimicking the diagnostic approach used by Application Engineers.
• Encoded Product Logic
  • Every Zurn product and suffix option was encoded into the tool to allow precision-level matches, as if a live expert were guiding the choice.
• Building-Wide Analysis
  • The platform could analyze an entire facility’s needs—across bathrooms, mechanical rooms, kitchens, and fire protection systems—then generate a full product list with downloadable specs.

https://inspec.zurn.com/

The new system delivered immediate and long-term value:

• Reduced manual engineering workload, eliminating the need to expand the internal Applications Engineering team
• Accelerated specification decisions, giving Zurn a stronger position earlier in the project lifecycle
• Improved accuracy and compliance, minimizing field-level product rework

Revenue impact: Zurn meet its goal of $100M in incremental sales over 5 years

More importantly, the tool has positioned Zurn as an innovation leader—helping engineers solve problems faster, with fewer resources, while capturing more early-stage market share.