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,

Mori Seiki Sweden sell and maintains machine tools in Sweden. Since September this year, the company is owned by the Japanese machine tools manufacturer Mori Seki. The company deals with lathes, machining centers and multi-axis turning centers.

Sales executives used to spend a lot of time creating sales quotes manually in the sales process. This was not an easy task, due to the extensive number options with associated rules for the machines, price updates from the manufacturer, currencies, customs charges etc.

Mori Seiki needed an efficient quotation tool to give quick responses to its customers and prospects. After examining the market for a suitable configurator, Mori Seiki chose COMBINUM.

To streamline the maintenace in COMBINUM, options and prices are imported from Excel.

The options are delivered in English from Mori Seiki in Japan and imported in their original language. The module COMBINUM Multi-Language is used for translating into Swedish.

Prices for the different options are imported and saved in Euro in the configurator. This is the price that Mori Seiki Sweden pays for the options. Since the Swedish customers want the prices in Swedish kronor, the prices are converted with the current exchange rate when the quote is generated.

Read more.

Where should the line between ERP system and configurator be drawn? What data should be entered where and how should the transfer between the systems be triggered?

These questions can usually cause some headache.

We have recently built and integration between COMBINUM and the ERP system GARP for Victorsson Industrier AB, a Swedish manufacturer of egg production systems.

The integration was kept simple with a clear border between the systems' responsibilities.

Items and customers are born and maintained in the ERP system, but they are automatically transferred to the configurator. All customers are transferred to COMBINUM, whilst only selected items are transferred. Screws and nuts are handled in the ERP system by itself.

In COMBINUM, the user arranges the selectable items in a logical structure and adds rules controlling when and with what quantity an item should be selected.

Quotes and orders goes in the other direction. These are fed in the configurator and automtically transferred to the ERP system when an order is created or when a quote is considered as likely to become an order.

The order is created in the ERP system with an entry pointing to an order item. The order item contains all the items selected by the configurator based on the rule set and the user's choices. Beyond this, some important items are stored as separate entries to make partial deliveries possible.

In COMBINUM 2.4, we introduce a completely new type of rule. We call it "Template Expression".

Template Expression is a formula based version of COMBINUM's old workhorse Template Rule, which is used for controlling parameters based on the values of other parameters.

But what's new here?

Formulas and mathematical functions have been around since the early days of COMBINUM. It can be used in prices, item structures, reports etc.

The big news is that formulas also can be used to directly control the content of input fields.

When creating a Template Expression, the user will see the similarities from creating a Template Rule.

The difference is that where you used to have check boxes controlling the rule triggering, you can now write a rule and where you used to write fixed values, you can now write a formula - that's it.