The product configurator at the heart of BuyDesign

BuyDesign® Configurator is a powerful, flexible product configurator (sales configurator) that can dramatically simplify many of your selling processes. It provides advanced capabilities in a software architecture that can be consistently deployed within all of your web-based, online, offline, and distributed applications.

While the BuyDesign product configurator is a key component of the BuyDesign Channel Sales and BuyDesign Storefront solutions, it can also be integrated seamlessly into your own custom applications and/or existing enterprise systems to provide an intuitive, consistent product configurator wherever guided product selection and configuration is needed.

The configurator engine

Configurator outputs

Product modeling studio

Integration and tailoring tools

The Configurator Engine

The configuration engine is the core of BuyDesign Configurator. It makes it fast and easy for your sales people and/or customers to select, configure, and price your products. At the same time, it ensures that only valid combinations of features, options, and dimensions are created, quoted, and ordered.

• Guided product selection helps users identify and select the product(s) that best fit their needs by providing attribute/requirement questions, results filtering, and match ranking capabilities.

• Product configuration helps users understand and select available features, options, and dimensions while ensuring they define a valid product. Features include: multi-level configuration, variable role-based and task-based processing, information links and applets, dynamic presentation of options based on previous selections, global options for rapid configuration and mass change of related items, and more.

• Product pricing ensures an accurate price for any given configuration. Highly flexible calculations can utilize just about any combination of table lookups, discounts, multipliers, margins, and markups associated with the product, selected options, and customer to produce option-based prices, including list price, discounted price, dealer cost, and/or any other price/cost view you need.

• Product visualization helps bring your products to life by providing immediate visual reference and confirmation at the product, feature, and option levels. Based on user-selected configuration attributes, images can be dynamically displayed from a library of static images. Or, using BuyDesign Flex2D, BuyDesign Flex3D , and BuyDesign FlexRender in conjunction with the BuyDesign configurator engine during the configuration process, configuration-specific 2D or 3D models can be dynamically generated with proper dimensions and options.

• A dynamic user interface makes the entire user experience highly intuitive, productive, and personalized. The ready-to-use UI is dynamically-rendered based on the product model, user type, and task. It includes screen zones for user interaction, visualization, information, and summary, with the ability to tailor many aspects of look and feel without programming. A rich array of controls such as drop-down lists, radio buttons, clickable images, sliders with min/max/step definitions, etc. are available for feature/option/dimension selection. Toolbar, option summary with links to details, rapid configuration, and mass change capabilities are just some of the other features that make the BuyDesign Configurator user interface extremely easy to learn and use. If required, advanced extensions can be developed and easily integrated.

Configurator Outputs

BuyDesign Configurator dramatically reduces the effort required to offer customized products by automatically creating just about any configuration-specific deliverable you need to support sales, manufacturing, or the customer. Outputs are generated either directly by the configurator engine, or by "generators" that produce content either during or after completion of the configuration process. Potential configuration-specific outputs include:

• A configuration code (e.g. configured part #, variant code, intelligent product identifier) for use in back-end systems that use a code to describe product configurations.

• Sales & service information such as selected options, final price, cost, commercial description, and other configuration-specific data items for use in various systems and documents.

• Manufacturing information such as the bill of material (BOM), routing, cut sheet, etc. for use in manufacturing planning and on the shop floor.

• A 2D and/or 3D CAD model and any associated drawings or thumbnail images for delivery to the customer, engineering, and/or manufacturing (requires BuyDesign Flex2D or BuyDesign Flex3D).

• Configured documents such as product a specification sheet, installation instructions, warranty, etc. for use by sales and service personnel, or for delivery to the customer along with the product. (e.g. PDF, Word, Excel, etc.)

Product Modeling Studio

The product models that drive BuyDesign Configurator are developed in the BuyDesign Studio. The BuyDesign Studio makes it easy to maintain comprehensive models that use both rules and constraints to make selection and configuration of even the most complex products intuitive and error-free.

• Integrated product & user experience modeling provides a single, consolidated configuration model for each of your products. Robust modeling tools include: a powerful combination of rules and constraints capabilities; multi-level configuration; rules inheritance; global options; dynamic configuration model view selection to control processing based on user type, task, and/or application; integrated information links and applets; external variable or program call; a mathematical expression builder for complex calculations; and more.

• The graphical user interface provides a visual representation of the model with point-and-click access to the details of every rule and constraint.

• A real-time testing environment enables you to iteratively develop and test models. Changes can be tested immediately without the need to use a separate application to invoke the configuration engine.

Integration and Tailoring Tools

BuyDesign Configurator can be integrated into just about any application where you need intuitive, accurate, and consistent product configuration capabilities. A robust Software Development Kit (SDK) provides the following capabilities:

• Application Programming Interface (API) expose various methods and properties to make it easy to embed the configuration engine in any application. The out-of-the-box user interface utilizes the API itself. The API also provides the ability to use the engine for batch processing applications.

• Host application services provide a set of extensions to manage configuration engine outputs in the context of the calling application. For instance, they provide the ability to synchronize configuration lines to the lines of an order, verify if the model has changed since the configuration was committed, and, perform many other useful functions that enable applications to maintain configuration data in proper context with their own data repositories. Windows applications can access host services through COM or .NET; non-Windows applications can access them through DBAPI.

• Interactive, batch, and web service modes allow access to the configuration engine from just about any type of application.

In addition, BuyDesign Integrator makes it easy to implement and manage 2-way data integration with your existing business, engineering, and document management systems. While the API and services architecture provides the ability to embed the configuration engine in applications, BuyDesign Integrator provides the ability to migrate or synchronize data between BuyDesign and your existing systems.