Sales and Product Configurator : A Comparative Study

Abstract: Today companies in the manufacturing industries need to do everything possible to stay ahead in their market, in order to make a profit. This means that they have to slim the organization and every employee has to be more efficient. In other words the companies have to accomplish more with less people. One way to rationalize the sales process is by using a sales and product configurator which is a software tool for handling products and its various variants by using rules and constraints in the configuration process. In this paper a background on why configurators are needed is presented, along with some theory behind the configurator software. Logica – a business and technology service company – gave us the task to make a comparative study of OTS (of the shelf) sales and product configurators, due to the increasing interest from the market. Originally the study should have been done on configuration software but this could not be arranged. Instead information was gathered from the Internet, literature, scientific journals, and proceedings from international conferences in order to make a comparative study. Interviews with persons from two Swedish companies, Tacton Systems AB and In-process AB, which develop and sell configurators, were also conducted to get this information. The report accounts for the result of the answers and their value.