Question 1

What is a manufacturability rule in a product configurator?

Accepted Answer

An explicit rule that prevents the configurator from selling combinations that production cannot make. Without these rules, a configurator can produce visually beautiful but production-impossible orders, which cause retours and escalations.

Question 2

Why must a configurator integrate with the ERP?

Accepted Answer

Without ERP integration, configurations are re-keyed manually for order processing, which introduces errors and double entries. The integration itself is rarely the technical challenge; specifying the data mapping correctly is.

Question 3

What documents should a configurator generate?

Accepted Answer

Production needs bills of materials and technical drawings; sales needs quotes; customers need visual confirmations. Without explicit document types and formats per recipient, the configurator stays an isolated sales tool that does not reach production.

Question 4

Why is pricing logic the source of most configurator failures?

Accepted Answer

If the configurator does not produce correct prices including discounts and exceptions, sales loses trust and reverts to parallel Excel sheets. Two pricing systems is worse than one bad one. Pricing rules must be documented and testable.

Question 5

Should end customers and sales use the same configurator?

Accepted Answer

Usually not. End customers and sales have different requirements: customers need simplicity and visual confirmation; sales needs speed, override options and full discount control. One interface for both is usually unusable for one of them.

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