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Product Configurator

Solving Configuration Issues

Solution

Visibility Product Configurator

Solution Benefits

By taking advantage of VISIBILITY’S configuration and product attribute capabilities, the customer was able to:

• Reduce the amount of engineering effort and time required to design products to customer specifications

• Capture mission critical information beginning at the time the order was booked and continuing through the production cycle

• Generate quality assurance reports with more accuracy and in less time.

Customer Background

A Visibility customer, located in the mid-western United States with annual revenues of $40M, manufactures control and safety devices for gas and fluid delivery systems. Used in a number of environments with a wide variety of pressurized media, these devices are configured and built to customer specifications.

Key Challenges

• Highly configurable product with multiple permutations

• Significant engineering time required to design products

• Manufacturing process is non-predictable and can have material variations

• Product use requires extensive operational certification and reporting

Detailed Challenges

The customer organizes its products into multiple product lines, each with a large number of selectable variables, resulting in virtually unlimited possible combinations of features and capabilities. This resulted in time-consuming efforts to both specify customer requirements and design the product itself. The process for manufacturing these products is more art than science; making it necessary to capture production-run information in order to incorporate it into future similar builds. Frequent requirements for product test and performance certification documents meant creating paperwork by hand in order to send it along with the products.

Solution Details

Develop a product configurator – Using the Interactive Selling System (ISS) module of VISIBILITY, the customer was able to establish design rules for configuring products based on performance specifications. The system prompts users to select from available lists of operational parameters and uses design rules to produce a final bill of material and routing with little additional input from engineering.

Capture significant product and production parameters – With the part attribute capability found in VISIBILITY Engineering Workbench, the customer was able to define and capture significant, retrievable information about the product itself and the build process that produced it. At the front end, these part attributes were fed directly from the ISS module while manufacturing attributes were provided as part of shop activity reporting.

Provide certification reports based on captured attributes – The Impromptu® report writer enabled the customer to develop certification documents that draw on the attribute information captured by ISS and reported by the shop floor. By simply calling for the certifications associated with a specific work order, users could print reports in a fraction of the time required to manually develop them.

Visibility’s product configurator and Engineering Workbench solutions deliver configuration and product attribute capabilities that increase bottom line results dramatically. These two tools generate efficiencies through reduced engineering time and the capture of critical information facilitating consistent communication and accuracy throughout the entire business cycle.