CONFOR – product finding, configuration and dimensioning

Companies that offer a wide variety of products need intelligent solutions that support them in configuring the products requested by their customers. This is essential to configure manufacturable products in a reasonable time, reliably determine their price and transmit the resulting bill of materials (BOM) to ERP or merchandise management systems. Tailor-made products must be created from standardized components. CONFOR supports you and your customers directly in carrying out these process steps.

Above all, by providing a CONFOR-based product finding and configuration system for use by their customers, companies that offer a wide range of products kill two birds with one stone – they improve their service and relieve their sales department. Errors that occur frequently in the manual configuration of complex products are as good as impossible with a system-based approach – the risk of incorrect deliveries and the resulting additional costs and deadline delays is reduced considerably. Your advantages in detail:

• The most cost-effective configuration that meets the customer’s requirements is determined in each case.
• Offers, whose manual creation takes hours or days, can be created in a few minutes including all printable documents (if desired, even by your customer himself).
• All the data necessary for the fulfilment of the order are already taken into account in the offer phase. No more activities are required when the order is placed.
• Due to the exact calculation basis, no “risk surcharges” are required with regard to date and price.

=> The order probability increases.

=> The number of offers that can be generated increases in a given period.

=> The calculation security with regard to costs and deadlines increases.

The functionality of the CONFOR system is very similar to that known from vehicle configurators – however, almost any complex product is supported. In most configuration scenarios, a selection of the general product type must be made at the beginning of the configuration process (comparable to the vehicle model in a vehicle configurator). After that, basic parameters have to be provided, for example with regard to the required performance or with regard to restrictions on the size. In the next step, the user is guided through the lay out of the assemblies belonging to the product using a wizard. CONFOR automatically creates the associated parts list and determines costs and sales prices. The underlying product logic is permanently checked, so that no components can be configured that do not match each other. Once the configuration has been completed, for example

• the configuration result can be transferred to an E-Commerce-solution
• an offer can be generated
• an order can be generated
• configuration, offer and order data can be passed directly to any ERP or merchandise management system.