Configit Takes a Lifecycle Approach to Configuration Management

Get ready for another acronym to join the alphabet soup of enterprise software platforms. Configit, founded in 2000, is marketing what it calls its Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) tool as a way to address common configuration challenges for manufacturers and engineers building complex products.

Companies in the industrial machinery, automotive and aerospace & defense industries, in particular, struggle to validate product configurations in a way that supports manufacturability of designs while ensuring profitability, according to Thomas Randrup, M.Sc., Ph.D., senior vice president of Emerging Business at Configit. Too often, companies validate complex systems at the point of product configuration as opposed to earlier in the design stage, which can lead to an array of challenges, from selling a product that can’t be manufactured to not having the proper components on hand to handle after sales service.

The miscue boils down to configuration data being dispersed across separate systems, preventing engineers, production specialists and others in the organization from working from the same page, he explains. The problem is amplified by the increasing complexity of products, driven in part by the rise of embedded software and the up-and-coming Internet of Things (IoT), Randrup adds.

“You can have 1,000 options on a product and if you add more features, you suddenly have 2,000 options,” he says. “You need a single system to govern that and translate all of the different rules for products into one structure.”

Design Rules

He says that single system is Configit, an enterprise platform tasked with compiling all of the rules surrounding product configuration into a single database and leveraging algorithms to create a virtual tabulation of the outcome. This idea of CLM is very different than what happens today where rules related to specific design configuration data might be stored in an engineering platform while rules related to generating price quotes based on configuration might live in another system and even worse, not be consistent with what engineering is using.

Configit manages all of the configuration definitions across all business processes throughout the entire lifecycle of a product, including the rules governing product design, manufacturing, sales and aftermarket service. A rule could constitute anything from what particular colors are available for a specific car model or a technical rule like what kind of exhaust system can be used in a specific vehicle model. Today, the technical rule related to the exhaust system might live in a PLM system while the color selection or pricing rules might be found in an order module of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. “We wrap all the different types of rules together and become a single source of truth governing the product,” Randrup explains.

Randrup says Configit isn’t looking to replace PLM (product lifecycle management) or ERP, rather it will serve as a complement specific to configuration data. The Configit portfolio comprises four components: Configit Ace, the full enterprise platform for authoring all configuration aspects of configurable products; Configit Quote, a configure-price-quote solution aimed at organizations selling complex configurable products using SAP Variant Configurator; Configit Model, a modeling and run-time environment for building configurator applications quickly; and Configit Build, a customizable configure-price-quote kit for building a user experience that incorporates 2D and 3D geometry.

While it remains to be seen whether companies have room for yet another enterprise-class system to manage product-related data, Randrup says manufacturers of complex products need a way to centralize and establish the DNA of a configurable product. “You can be more efficient if throughout the process, you have the exact same set of information,” he says. “If you try to find that configuration information in the PLM or ERP system, you only have part of that knowledge.”

This video provides some background on how Configit Quote works: