Product Configuration 1

[aggieengineerrmb]

Does anyone have any positive experience with the implementation and use of a rules based product configuration software package? We are a valve manufacturer is part high volume manufacturer and part engineer to order supplier. My company would like to use this approach to help streamline the product quotation process by reducing (or eliminating) the need to get engineering involved with specific questions about what can be quoted and also insure that some of the tribal knowledge that currently exists in the heads of engineers is effectively captured. Seems like a good approach, but my experience with softare in the past is that it overpromises and underdelivers.

 

[BML]

I suppose it depends on what you mean by product configuration. The company I work at uses an assembly configurator to generate part identities, bills of material, and routings on the fly. It works great, and it is all based on pre-defined and pre-designed lower-level parts.

However, I have heard a lot of grumblings about configurators that will "design" a part for you. It seems that there are typically too many special considerations to be effectively programmed. Perhaps you can only "configure" a subset of products, and the rest that need special consideration could either be done manually or based off a configured model.

Hope this helps!

 

[AHay]

Knowledge-Based Engineering software can (and often does) deliver, but as the previous post mentions, you should not realistically aim to cover every case with this type of software.

There are many web sites covering techniques used for knowledge capture and maintenance to ensure that you get at the right information and store it in a useful, maintainable way. (Knowledge Management in Google)

Off the shelf packages can be used to represent simple rules and components with no programming, but for complex processes you will need to resort to some programming - but specific knowledge based applications can simplify the programming task.

KBE modules are available for many of the major CAD systems, but these don't always provide the flexibility that you are after. Some are nothing more than parametric models driven by formulae where as it sounds like you require something which will allow you to alter topology and size based on the user inputs.

This type of software requires a different approach to conventional software development methodologies - the software tends to evolve rather than being fully specified at the start of development, so the language used should support this (I'd rule out C/C++ for KBE). VB is a reasonable starting place if you've got experience of that, else I'd look to Python or Lisp.

Even if the rules aren't specific enough to perform on 100% of the cases, they usually give a good starting point for those that fall outside of the software scope.

Hope that helps.

 

[mcorker]

There are many suppliers of configuration software. For a listing of suppliers check out:

http://www.seradex.com/product_configurator_directory.shtml

If you have more specific questions let me know.

Mark Corker

http://www.seradex.com