Configurable products - Lessons learned from the Finnish industry

In this paper we present experiences on configurable products gathered in co-operation with Finnish companies. The reasons that made configurable products important include the ability to efficiently fulfil a wide range of customer requirements, shorter lead times in the sales-delivery process and increased control of production. We discuss the product development and sales-delivery processes of configurable products and their practical problems. These included partially configurable products, poor quality of configuration models and lack of clearly defined product policy. Companies had migrated to configurable products from one-of-a-kind products and fixed products (i.e. products manufactured repetitively according to a fixed specification). The direction of migration affects the benefits, problems and necessary changes. The requirements of the sales-delivery process and the product must be understood to gain full benefit from a product configurator. In addition, the process must usually be re-engineered and products designed for configurability. Companies often neglect these issues and the long-term management of configuration knowledge. This leads to major difficulties in configurator projects