Work
A door that is actually a product family
For a manufacturer of highly configurable doors I worked as CPQ engineer on the complex product structures in Autodesk Inventor and Tacton.
The client name does not need to sit at the centre here. The interesting part is the complexity of the product itself.
More than width and height
An industrial door can differ on many more points than dimensions alone.
The construction can consist of different layers and materials. There are fire-safety requirements. Locks can be visible or concealed. Frames can be executed in steel. Some variants have very specific applications, such as doors for prison environments.
When all those choices influence each other, a classic list of options quickly becomes unworkable.
Door layers, materials, fire, locks, frames — anonymised
My role
I worked on the project as CPQ engineer.
My focus was mainly on the more complex door structures in Inventor and Tacton: how the product build-up is represented, which combinations are possible, and how the technical variant comes out of that.
I did not stay for the move into production. On this site I therefore also do not want to claim that I followed the full trajectory through to live production.
Why constraints make sense here
In this kind of product family almost everything is connected.
A material choice can affect a fire class. A lock type can put limits on the construction. A frame choice can force or exclude other components.
You can try to solve all of that with loose rules, but then the model quickly grows into a collection of exceptions.
Constraint-based configuration forces you to look at the product differently: which properties exist, which domains are valid, and which relations always have to hold?
That was an important step in how I started looking at product configuration.
What I take from this
A complex configurator does not get better by adding more rules.
It gets better when the product model itself becomes clearer.
That insight comes back today in my work around semantic product models and engineering automation.