In a world of Configuration

 Many companies find themselves moving from Engineering og designing to stock and orders over Assemble to order further to Configure to order. Driven by the diversification of customers needs and requests. Endless efforts of standardization is followed by an increase in the traditional battles between sales and engineering or manufacturing departments.

Instead of fighting this impossible battle good and well proven methods and solutions for being in control with dynamic configuration through valuechain is a way out.

Parameters and Attributes

 The parameters used for configuration and their list of values will not only be the foundation for the logical rules in the configuration engine. 

 They will most often also be the resulting data exposed in different subscribing systems and user interfaces as attributes, their label and list of values. Dynamically by interacting with the configurator or as more static extracts.

 As Configurator systems or CPQ systems (Configure, Price, Quote) as a rule is highly integrated with other systems, the qualities of unambiguous, precise, consistent and human understandable Master Data will be required to ensure the widespread use and integrations to work properly.

 The dependency can be illustrated like this:

I address the importance of getting in control having good definitions of concepts and terminology in a separate article.

 For the remaining steps the experience is, that companies believe they can implement configurators and CPQ systems based on their existing Master Data – even they are not sufficiently aligned across systems and functional areas in the company, but often transformed by endless mappings. Even managed manually by extracting and loading spreadsheets between systems holding the transformations. And believe they will still get the configurations to work smoothly.

Configuration by a foundation of good Master Data

 A good and successful implementation of Configurator systems or CPQ systems requires the described attention to the Master Data behind.

 This approach has been developed into many successful implementations working together with the leading advisor and implementation partner SolutionSpace. You can read more about their work here: SolutionSpace – managing your complexity.

 I you want to hear more about this approach and derived Enterprise Architecture for Master Data in a world of Configuration, 
please contact me for a meeting or short workshop where inspiration on this can be shared.