Product Configuration and Engineering

One of the most common business questions we encounter is whether the ERP system is able to combine product configuration with additional engineering.

We understand the question. Many of our customers sell configurable equipment where customer specific enhancements are common. These enhancements have to do with specific applications that the equipment is used in and can never be part of a configuration. For engineering these enhancements are not a big design challenge. The problem lies in the workflow and whether an ERP system is able to handle this business scenario.

Configurators are primarily designed to produce a BOM and a Route, in addition to things like pricing and configured product descriptions (or even entire manuals). The idea behind the configurator functionality is that the produced BOM and Route are complete, so a sales order can become a production order immediately. But for many of our customers this is simply not how their process works.

Considerations…

If the business frequently requires additional engineering on top of a configured product, three things have to be investigated in the ERP system:

Can the BOM as produced by a configurator be changed? This will normally be the case but doing this will create difficulties for the re-use of existing configurations. If the re-use functionality would copy an existing BOM and route of a previously configured item, we would copy the engineered modifications also.  What should be done instead is to make copy of the configured BOM and add the uniquely engineered part numbers to it. On the BOM a sales order# or project# should be added for later searching. The copy of the configured BOM then becomes the correct ‘Sales-BOM’ with the engineered enhancements.