Manufacturing · industrial product configuration
Product configuration keeps an impossible combination of options from ever reaching a quote. You declare the characteristics and values of each product, write rules (requires, excludes, prerequisite, minimum and maximum selection), and the CRM validates the customer's choice before generating any price. An invalid configuration produces no bill of materials and no price, and every approved configuration is kept as an immutable snapshot of what was sold.
In a make to order plant, the most expensive mistake is not the discount: it is the impossible combination. The rep promises a machine with an option that cannot live alongside another one, the customer signs, and the factory finds out on the shop floor. Product configuration exists so that combination never becomes a quote in the first place.
The three pieces
Configuration rests on three things you declare per product:
- Characteristics and values: what can be chosen. For example, the characteristic Voltage with the values 220 V and 380 V, or Finish with Standard paint and Epoxy paint.
- Rules: what can coexist with what. Rules are declarative, so you do not program anything: you describe the condition and the CRM evaluates it.
- Severity: each rule is either an error, which stops the configuration from going any further, or a warning, which passes but is recorded for whoever approves.
The available rule types cover the classic cases in commercial engineering: an option that requires another, an option that excludes another, a prerequisite, a minimum and a maximum number of items selected within a characteristic, and exclusivity between values. It is the same rules engine used by the configurator in the bill of materials module, so anyone who already writes rules there will find the same logic here.
Rules with a version and an effective period
Every rule has a version and can have an effective period, that is, a date on which it starts to apply and one on which it stops. That solves the most tedious audit problem in industry: working out, two years later, why that machine came out the way it did. A configuration keeps the version of the rules that was in force at the moment it was generated, so the answer is always verifiable, and changing the rules today does not rewrite the past.
What happens when a configuration is validated
Validation runs over the customer's selection and returns two lists: errors and warnings. If there is any error, the configuration is recorded as invalid along with the violations that failed it, and the process stops there: no bill of materials is exploded and no price is calculated. An invalid configuration does not become a quote, and that is the single most important rule in the whole mechanism.
When the configuration is valid, the CRM does three things at once: it explodes the product structure to find out which components this specific combination consumes, it calculates the price when you point to the pricing rule to use, and it stores the lead time you provided. All of that is frozen into a configuration snapshot, with the quantity, the currency and the rule version. That snapshot is what documents what was sold.
Where this shows up today
Product configuration has its own tab on the Manufacturing screen: Configurator. There you register the characteristics and their values, write the simplest rules, pick a combination and watch it being checked as you choose, then generate the configuration and turn a valid one into a quote. The same characteristics, rules and configurations can also be loaded by whoever handles your integration, and the result flows through the rest of the vertical: a valid configuration feeds the quote, and an invalid configuration on a line becomes a blocker that keeps the order from being handed to the ERP.
Prerequisites and limits
- The Manufacturing vertical has to be turned on in Settings → Verticals, otherwise nothing in configuration responds.
- Writing or changing characteristics, rules and configurations requires write permission; read access can be granted more widely.
- Exploding components depends on the product structure being registered. With no BOM, a valid configuration is still generated, just without a component list.
- A price is only calculated when you point to the pricing rule to use; without one, the configuration stays valid and without a value.
- Changing a rule does not invalidate configurations already generated: they keep the rule version from their own time, on purpose.