Bringing value-added engineering to your quotations and orders

TCM’s product configuration capability offers two levels of functionality designed to fit all variations of “To Order” Demand Management.

The TCM Features and Options application helps you to customize a delivered product. You can organize and define available “features” and “options” for a product line and define rules governing their usage. This covers palletize-to-order (non-stocked, non-controlled, manufactured items or kits) and configure (assemble-to-order) products.

The Rule-Based Configurator (RBC) offers you a powerful, multilevel configuration capability, which can impact both bill of materials and routing operations for highly complex engineered products as well as simple assemble-to-order products. With TCM’s RBC, the configuration rules, options and calculations necessary to “engineer” this type of product become part of the TCM PDM database and may be used by less technical personnel to process orders without direct engineering involvement. Use of the RBC can drastically reduce order lead times and engineering costs by allowing engineering to focus on orders falling outside the rules and on new product development.

Features and Options

Feature & Options provides a complete set of tables that can define an unlimited series of feature groups within a product line. Within each feature group a set of valid options may be defined. Defaults for ease of entry can be defined at multiple levels, and certain features and/or options can be set as “always select when” or never select “when”. In addition, quantities may be required for selected option items. Specific pricing by feature and/or option, as well as specific material components and manufacturing operations can also be generated and tied to the customer order.

Configurator Rules and Selections

Your Configurator Rules & Selections are activated in Bill of Materials, Routing, Costing, SFC, Estimating & Order Entry. Here’s an example in Bill of Materials. The screwdriver is a flat-head with many handle options shown here.

Matrix Bill of Material and Configurator

Matrix BOM or “Super Bill” can be tied to Configurator, as shown here. This example shows how the Handle Color selected is tied to the Feature Handle Color.

Matrix Routing and Configurator

Matrix Routing also can be tied to the Configurator.