Welcome to the latest issue of COMBINUM Newsletter.

COMBINUM is a configurator, which salesmen and customer use to make quotes and orders for complex products. Rules are used to prevent disallowed choices, calculate prices, create reports, render graphics and build bill of materials. Read more at www.combinum.com.

We hope you enjoy the newsletter and that it helps you to make the most of COMBINUM. Please, send the newsletter to your business associates.

Best regards,

10 years ago IT was a hot topic. The Dot-com bubble was underway to burst, the facade of "the New Economy" would soon crack. The days when companies with 100 million in losses and 3 million in revenue could be valued to hundreds of million euros on the stock market would soon be over.

The company In-process Sweden AB was formed in these tumultuous days.

Initially, we worked mostly with the PDM systems, but configurators has always been in our hearts. In 2005 we started the development of the configurator COMBINUM.

We are now celebrating 10 years and can look back on the first decade, that for In-process, has been characterized by a strong organic growth without any red numbers.

What will it be like in 2020?

Pipelife is a multinational company that manufactures plastic pipes and chambers to infrastructure projects.

But does a producer of plastic pipes need a configurator? Chambers are more complex than you might think and Pipelife wanted to reach out to end users, WW consultants, engineers, etc. so that they can build chambers on the internet by themselves. The requirements of an easy to use and self-instructional system were therefore high.

They fell for COMBINUM and with a starting period of 3-4 months they have taken a publically available configurator into service.

The user is guided by distinct images and a set of rules that prevents disallowed selections. Behind the scenes dimensions are calculated using formulas and matrices, and items are selected from a structure. This occurs in real-time as the user specifies the chamber.

The end result is a bill of materials where each item is illustrated with an image. The user can also request a report to file or to continue work on in Microsoft Word.

Learn more. You can also test the configurator or book a guided demo.

Did you know that you can write rules in COMBINUM that are looking for a specific value among all parameters of a configuration?

Example from real life: A house manufacturer offers its customers to choose the type and size of windows. Windows are selected from a drop-down list for each window position. But how do you get a price calculation, which is easy to maintain with so many window parameters?

The solution is to look for occurrences. You add every window model once in the price list and multiply by the number of occurrences in the house configuration. To calculate the number of occurrences the ParameterOcc function is used. Occ stands for occurrences.

Sample rule:

ParameterOcc(ActiveParameter("Value") = "Villa 2-sash 5-5V")

Quotation letters and order acknowledgements are common reports that you would like from a configurator. With atomized reports manual and tedious work is avoided and focus can be moved to the customer relation.

Recipients of the reports are customers so it's import that the reports have a professional design and that they follow the graphical profile of the company.

We have spared no effort in development of the new module COMBINUM Reports to give you the tools for elegant design and layout. You can format texts and tables with Microsoft® Words standard styles or your own. Manually change fonts, text heights, bold/italic style, underlining etc. Add pictures, tables, bullet lists and numbered lists. Design margins, headers, footers and much more.

But the surface is not all - under the hood the report should have the right contents. Therefore reports can present all data from a configuration but also generated data like calculated values, prices, nomenclatures, bill of materials and sub configurations.

Read more about COMBINUM Reports.