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,

ASKO Appliances, a producer of household appliances, uses COMBINUM. But do you need to configure a dishwasher?

Consumers, like you and I, chooses our dishwasher among brands and models in the warehouse, but ASKOs household appliances are sold around the world and under different brands. Demands and desires vary and therefore the supply must be differently configured.

With all ASKOs available choices you must answer about 100 questions to configure a modern dishwasher. The set of rules controls what can be combined etc.

For every machine there is a large amount of technical data like dimensions, energy and water consumption, sound and program data. With hundreds of active configurations for each type of machine it's a fastidious task to keep all data up-to-date and correct. But by connecting the product data to controlling parameter values COMBINUM can generate correct and fresh product data every time someone asks.

Read more.

To introduce a configurator on a new market is a long and exciting process. You should find a reseller, build a mutual trust, educate, support in marketing and in selling.

In Italy it took two years from the first meeting with our reseller Pivotal Italia (CDM Tecnoconsulting) until the first orders. System Ceramics in the corporate group System spa came first.

System Ceramics is world leading in decoration and automation devices for ceramics. They have solutions for decoration, storage, sorting, packaging, palletization and handling.

The project comprises introduction of COMBINUM and Pivotal CRM and is planned to go live in the start of 2011.

System Ceramics choose COMBINUM integrated with Pivotal CRM to meet the needs to:

• codify the technical knowledge of specialists and to make it available
• save time during validation and pricing of quotes
• certify quotes with the help of coded rules
• streamline the production process and integrate with the next step (SAP)

Most industry companies nowadays have a CRM system (Customer Relationship Management), a system that supports nurturing of the relations with the company's lifeblood - its customers.

But for a long time CRM was not a given part of the process and a remarkably number of CRM projects have failed over the years. In order to succeed with the introduction of new working procedures, the system must be focused on its task and easy to use so that the users adopt it.

A company that has embraced this idea and set the user-friendliness in the driver's seat is CDC Software with its system Pivotal CRM 6.0. Pivotal CRM is a modern CRM system built on the innovative Microsoft .NET platform as is COMBINUM.

It is with pride we launch the integration between Pivotal CRM 6.0 and COMBINUM. It's a standard integration that has been developed in close cooperation with Pivotal Italia.

Read more.