Configurator (introduction)

The competitive power of a company is determined more and more by the speed of a company to meet customer requirements. Today’s business must be capable to deliver a customer specific product within the delivery time of a standard product.

In a traditional production control system, the product structure generally consists of:

Product data defined like this may be adequate for companies producing only one or just a few products. However, if a large number of variants of the finished product is produced, assembling or manufacturing of a product is usually only started when the customer's order has been received. In such cases, the traditional information system may run into problems with respect to quantity, complexity, and manageability of the product data. Also the timely availability of the information can be problematic.

Almost every company that assembles to-order deals with product variants. In that case, you cannot define the product structures for all versions of all finished products in advance. The answer to this problem is configuration management. Configuration management must be translated into a well thought-out, modular, product design with proper validation and decision support functions provided by the information system to enhance the level of logistic control. LN offers such an application, Product Configuration (PCF).

The following sections provide an overview of how to set up Product Configuration (PCF), and subsequently, how to work with it.

Before setting up product configuration in LN, you must define items of the Generic type in the Item Base Data module, the so-called generic items.

A generic item can have various features linked to it. The product features are the basis for a procedure to define the product specifications. For every feature you can define various options, which reflect the choices you can make with regard to a specific feature. For example, for a feature COLOR, you could define the options red, yellow, and blue. By using constraints, certain selections can be excluded or made mandatory. A combination of options chosen for a generic item, reflects a product variant. You can view, define and maintain configuration data for a generic item in one single session: Configurable Item - Structure (tipcf3100m100).

Multi-language support enables you to define the characteristic features of a product in several languages. For each feature you can define one or more options in several languages. You can state whether options can be freely selected or are bound to a specific domain.

You can define purchase and selling prices for each generic item. On the basis of the selling prices stated for the generic item, LN calculates the selling prices of the product variants. Purchase prices come in when generic items are purchased, for instance as part of a generic subassembly or finished product.

Refer to How to define a product model

When product configuration is set up, you can configure a product for a customer by selecting an option for every feature of the product. The translation of customer requirements results into a product variant. The process can be controlled by a set of decision rules, the constraints. The constraints indicate which components and operations can or cannot be used in a specific version.

The product configurator can be triggered from several places in LN, as indicated in the table below. Dependent on where a product variant is configured, the product variant receives a reference type, which can be viewed in the Product Variants (tipcf5501m000) session.

If the Customized field in Items (tcibd0501m000) session for the generic item on which the product variant is based is set to Yes, a PCS project must created to generate the project structure. If the if the Customized field is set to No, a project is not required.