Industry Insight
Modern Configuration: Streamlining and Clarifying the Possibilities
By: Henrik Hulgaard, cofounder and vice president of product management, Configit
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ncreasingly complicated configuration workflows with a growing number of rules, dependencies and variants are a challenge for manufacturers today. This heightens the need for building and improving product models, as well as conducting thorough evaluations of all viable configurations and rule dependencies in a product model. There is a demand for more sophisticated configuration technologies as a result of the rising pressure on existing configuration processes. It's essential to comprehend the various technologies and what configuration solutions are capable of if you want to convince customers that everything you sell can actually be built.
What manufacturers are up against Products are becoming more complex. There are millions of different possible configurations of a certain product in some businesses. Every one of these configurations has a unique set of details, including its price, documentation, CAD drawings and a Bill of Materials (BoM). Manufacturers are attempting to control all these various configurations and make sure that they are only providing customers with options that are truly available. It
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is quite challenging to maintain everything in a coherent, understandable and visible way across many functions. But managing the complexity of configurable products is not just about the physical product. It involves managing software aspects as well as aftermarket/servicing. Introducing software into products causes several issues, not all of which can be addressed using a configuration solution. For example, the software development cycle/versioning can be difficult to align with the traditional lifecycle of physical products as managed in a product life cycle management (PLM) system. However, a configuration system can ensure that software parameters that needs to be set when deploying the product are set according to the requirements specified as part of the configuration process. Identifying and configuring a particular product in the point-of-sale can also generate the configuration parameters that need to be set when the product is commissioned. A configuration system is also central when replacing parts or upgrading an existing machine with new capabilities, such as understanding how the machine was configured. This is a better starting point than understanding the parts-content of the machine.