Improving decision making in the early phases of configuration projects

During the early phases of configuration projects very important decisions are made which will heavily influence the performance of the company, benefits in different functional areas (production, sales, purchase, product development, service etc), maintenance of the configuration system and quality of the dialogue between the configuration system and the users.

Today there exists very sparse tools and procedures which can assist the early phases, i.e. conceptual modeling of the products and prod¬uct assortment. This paper presents a five-phase procedure for conceptual mod¬eling in configuration projects. Each of the five phases is sup¬ported by a set of tools.

The main idea of the pro¬cedure is utili¬zation of a so-called Product Family Master Plan, which is a formal description of the product assortment and its variation. The procedure has been tested at one of Baan's cus¬tomers with very convincing results.