Easy to communicate

A configurator can solve many challenges related to mass customization products. Challenges exists all along the road from request to delivered product and therefor the configurator often acts as a central connection point.

But to act as a central connection point places great demands in the ability to communicate. If the quoting and order processes shall be efficient, integrations to surrounding systems are required.

The integration challenge

Integration between the configurator and the ERP system is normally a must have and if one has a separate CRM system this is a given point of integration as well. But it’s also common and smart to use the configurator to control production machines and test equipment as well as programming the manufactured product.

When communicating from the configurator the task is to send data that has first been structured so that the receiving system can understand it. This is true whether the call is made to a web service or the data is sent as a file.

The challenge is to reach processed configuration data, like parameter values or a bill of materials, restructure it according to a data contract and to send this to the receiving system.

COMBINUM Code

To achieve this in the simplest and cheapest way possible we have developed COMBINUM Code. This is a new module that is released in June 2019 together with version 3.1.

With Code you can reach any data related to a configuration. You model the output data via a tree structure and select which code engine to use.

There are ready-to-go code engines for the formats XML, JSON and TXT. But you can even add custom engines for other formats including binary.

All content can be controlled and manipulated using rules and formulas. Furthermore, you can use powerful “repeaters” to generate loops and to gather data independently of the product.