BuyDesign™ 4.0 Delivers Enterprise-Class Scalability, Mission-Critical Reliability, and Extensive Visualization Capabilities

Enhancements Position Configuration and Sales Software Solutions for the Most Demanding of Environments

Version 4.0 of the BuyDesign™ Product Customization Management System is now available. BuyDesign 4.0 includes a wide range of technical and functional enhancements that together position BuyDesign for deployment in the most demanding environments where rapid processing of high transaction volumes, dynamic display of complex configured products, and high availability are required. The new release also provides expanded capabilities for visualization of product features and configurations. BuyDesign is in use today by leading manufacturers of highly customizable products as wide ranging as: windows and doors, pumps, industrial heating systems, and auditorium seating.

Fully integrated with MAC-PAC ® XE™ and other ERP solutions, BuyDesign is a suite of software solutions developed to help manufacturers streamline the design, sales, and production of highly customized products. It supports a holistic approach to managing the entire life-cycle of mass-customized products in order to offer them at costs and delivery times comparable to mass-produced products. Developed to bridge the gap between existing manufacturing and engineering systems, BuyDesign provides web-based configuration and sales applications that address the unique requirements of customized product manufacturers where other applications fall short – that is to eliminate the bottlenecks associated with creation of configuration-specific quotes, orders, bids, images, drawings, and documentation needed by customers, sales, and manufacturing. BuyDesign reduces the time and effort required to produce these deliverables by up to 90%.

Specific enhancements delivered in BuyDesign 4.0 include:

• Load balancing and failover to provide:
  • Virtually unlimited scalability with the incremental addition of low-cost windows-based servers for processing of configuration services, engineering services (automated model generation), and/or online sales transactions.
  • Extremely high reliability with automatic transfer of processing to alternate servers when a server fails.
  
  
  
• A new content caching capability to further speed processing by automatically maintaining and accessing a library of commonly requested configuration-specific models, drawings, and data.



• New attribute-driven lookup of static images to enable the association and display of fixed images related to any feature, feature combination, or product configuration.



• Enhanced workflow capabilities to enhance collaboration capabilities among dealers, distributors, and the manufacturer.



• Performance monitoring and capacity planning tools to help system managers identify load trends and plan for incremental changes in processing power.



• Significant performance improvements throughout the product.

With version 4.0, companies can deploy BuyDesign to support virtually any number of users with a wide range of dynamic and static product visualization and drawing generation capabilities.

In addition to enhancements to the product, the installation procedure has also been significantly enhanced, with all components now delivered on a single CD using a menu-driven installation process.

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