Product Configuration / CPQ

I help manufacturers structure complex configurable products: product families where dimensions, options, materials and technical choices influence each other, and where that logic has to remain useful beyond the sales screen.

The difficult part is usually not building another form. It is making the product knowledge explicit enough that a configurator can decide which combinations are valid and what each choice means for geometry, components, price, engineering and manufacturing.

That underlying product model is the part I like working on.

If you want a configurator for your own product, with a fixed price and timeline, Kubuz configurators explains how that goes.

I came into product configuration through parametric CAD and directional rules. That remains a very practical approach when the dependencies have a clear direction.

Working with Tacton and constraint-based configuration added another way of looking at products where choices influence each other in several directions. Instead of describing a long execution order with if/then logic, you can describe relations that have to remain valid whatever the user chooses first.

I do not choose one technique in advance. The product determines which logic is useful.

Many industrial products sit somewhere between a standard catalogue item and a completely new engineering project.

That is often where configuration becomes interesting. The first question is not how to automate every exception, but which engineering decisions actually repeat. Those repeated decisions can become parameters, modules, rules and constraints while genuine one-off engineering remains outside the configured space.

For me, moving from engineer-to-order towards configure-to-order is therefore mainly a product-modelling problem before it becomes a software problem.

Product configuration does not have to stop at the edge of the CPQ tool.

A technical product eventually has to be designed and made. The same product knowledge can therefore be useful for CAD geometry, bills of materials, drawings, price calculations and production output.

That does not all have to live in one system. What matters is that the meaning does not have to be translated again at every boundary.

I can help structure a product family, define parameters and domains, rules and constraints, product structures, and the connection to CAD or other technical output.

That can be inside an existing CPQ platform such as Tacton, or as part of a custom configurator when a standard package does not fit the product or process well.

My role often sits between product knowledge and implementation: first understand what is actually being configured, then decide how the system should represent it. Have you got a configurable product that keeps collecting exceptions, or engineering knowledge that is still rebuilt for every order? Send me some context.