The Integrated Solution for Configurable Products
The trend in today's market place is for customers to increasingly look for products tailored to their exact requirements, whilst, conversely, manufacturers are looking to offer a smaller range of 'standard' solutions.

In order to address this, many products are now designed with customisable elements to enable a common product to feel personalised. To manage this process, some kind of 'rules-based' configuration is required. Sage Line 500 has just such a configuration tool.

Tailored Environment

The Configurator can generate any one of the following outputs:

•	Quotation
•	Sales Order
•	Bills of Material
•	Estimate
•	Works Order
•	Route

Depending on the existing method of operation any selection / combination of these can be produced.

Powerful Configuration Language
The power house behind the Configurator is the self contained language that sets the generic rule to be used for a set of circumstances, for example, Sales Orders, Bills of Material, Routes, Work Order and Part Numbers can be generated automatically to match the product configuration. Prices and margins can be calculated in flight and put onto the Sales Order line. This ‘script’ may well support the configuration of many different product types or may be unique to a particular product.

User Maintained Tables
Having set the scene using the configurator language, the product rule tables are used to supply the detail. Simple in concept, and based on spreadsheet principles, where the first column contains all the option types, such as colours, the subsequent columns contain the respective individual options, such as red and green. Beneath each of these data types there is an extensive facility to set questions, jump options and really define the peculiarities of a product. There is no longer any need to set up hundreds, or even thousands of part numbers to represent combinations of options and choices. This can all be done via these simple table entries.

Pre Order Facilities
This facility covers all areas of a company that configure product in the course of business. Quotation and Estimate processing are standard functions within the product to support the sales activity and to ensure the accuracy of these documents. The Configurator can use customer specific price lists where required and has the ability to run a credit check during processing of a new quotation or estimate. Special coding is built in to prevent any Quotations or Estimates being loaded to the main operation until they have been converted to confirmed Sales Order.

Has it been made before?
Any option can be defined as an attribute and stored in a specific area within the Configurator. When the circumstance arises and the question is asked, a simple attribute search will reveal the answer. This powerful facility saves large numbers of Bills of Material and Routes being created, as the stored attribute string will always come back with the definition of the original product. This also enables the retrieval of any stocked configurations that meet the requirement. This is particularly useful where economic batch size is greater than one and/or where customer returns are significant.

Presentation
As well as being presented to users with the standard Line 500 screens, the Configurator can be used with a Visual Basic front end. It is fully web enabled and can be published to a web page to allow external users to configure their own products whilst also being used by internal users, perhaps in a telesales environment. It can also be run in background mode for integration with third party systems.