Configit Ace® – 2021 Jan Release

Configit Ace® - 2021 Jan Release

We are happy to announce the Ace® - 2021 Jan Release of the Configit’s enterprise-grade configuration platform - Configit Ace®.

We at Configit understand that building to market needs is important. Therefore, we have instituted professional advisory boards with both our customers and partners to ensure we are building our products to meet market expectations.

This release of Configit Ace® includes new features and enhanced capabilities such as:

  • Modular modeling capability
  • History tracking of configuration rules
  • Creating and editing table rules, including Excel support
  • Integration to Aras Innovator PLM
  • SAP S/4 HANA integration with Configit Ace®


To learn more about these new features and enhanced capabilities, see the relevant section below .

New Modular Modeling Feature

Product modelers benefit from being able to reuse components, sub-models and structures for building new product models. This reduces time spent on creating new product models and allows for optimization of old product models.

The result is less maintenance of your product model logic and structure. This supports a more streamlined manufacturing process where products are built from subcomponents, allowing you to model much more complex models without losing the overview.

For any product design, there are thousands of potential option combinations that can be considered. Configit Ace® provides you with enterprise features for governing versioning, traceability, high-quality debugging, and collaboration support across large teams of product designers.

Rules can be authored across sub-models and all the standard features of versioning, logging, traceability and debugging are available on the modular structures.

For example, the introduction of modular modeling would mean that rather than creating over 3,000 families to model one of their products, the re-use of models allows them to create and maintain only 45 families in a few sub-components and reuse these across the model.

Contact us to learn more
ace modeling

Tracking the History of Your Configuration Rules

Global manufacturing companies with complex products develop their offerings based on many years of experience. At the heart of the business is the knowledge of the rules that govern the variants of the products.

These rules are key business assets that must be carefully maintained and carried forward for a company to stay efficient and competitive. Rule maintenance is a joint effort typically spanning several people and teams.

While a number of basic rules can stay stable over years, many other rules need to change as products and demands develop.

Other sources of changes also challenge rule maintenance, such as:

  • Changes in team members, with a potential loss of rule knowledge as a consequence
  • Changes in the organization as a consequence of mergers or changed responsibilities
  • Changes in business requirements of what features to use in marketing of products, or changes in manufacturing processes
  • Increased complexity and addition of staff for maintaining the rules
 

It is important to keep knowledge both secure and easy to access over time by people who are not necessarily the original authors of the rules. This should be maintained efficiently, requiring the least amount of manual detective work.

With this new enterprise feature in Configit Ace®, we have created a more efficient way for customers and partners to manage rule history in the easiest and most cost-efficient way. Configit Ace® provides teams of product modelers with the tools required to efficiently create and maintain rules for configurable products.

Configit Ace® records each change made to the models for full auditability. This information is at the product modelers’ fingertips as they model, so they can access critical information about who changed what and when, for rules and feature families.

 

The benefits include:

  • Making faster, more informed decisions when making a change
  • Inspecting who has changed a rule, what was changed, and when it was changed
  • Easier hand-over of modeling responsibility to a new person or team without losing important rule history information
  • Reducing the risk of knowledge loss and avoid rules being a black-box without history
  • Ensuring error-free product configuration by better debugging across multiple users
Contact us to learn more

Capabilities for Creating and Editing Table Rules, Including Excel Support

Managing the vast complex of rules and product constraints dictating configuration options requires a solution capable of scaling to meet requirements today and in the future.

The ability to efficiently create product models has long been a key differentiator for Configit. For years, this has been a rich and important feature in Configit Model and is now coming to Configit Ace® combined with all the enterprise strength that Ace® provides for collaboration, logging and traceability.

Configit Ace® now supports modelers to create and maintain table rules directly through the Configit Ace® user interface, including functionality for import and export with Excel. Most users are familiar with table editing in Excel and will be immediately able to use that experience in creating table rules for use in Ace® as well.

Contact us to learn more

Integration to Aras Innovator PLM

Most manufacturing enterprises use dozens of software systems to manage all aspects of their operations, from manufacturing to sales to fulfilment. These systems often evolve from a focus on one specific business function or process. PLM systems, like Aras Innovator, have expanded to take on more tasks, but the focus of the system is still rooted in its original purpose.

PLM systems generally support engineers well, however modern businesses need to combine PLM with the enterprise. With the new Aras Innovator Solution Accelerator, you can leverage the strengths of Configit Ace® in combination with Aras Innovator PLM.

The Aras PLM Innovator Solution Accelerator supports importing of engineering rules from Aras Innovator into Configit Ace® to enrich products with commercial rules. This integration enables you to leverage Configit Ace’s enterprise-grade features such as high-performance debugging, solution space analysis, and deployment for websites.

Integration between Aras PLM and Configit Ace® can be done in several ways. Configit is the first to develop an Aras PLM Solution Accelerator to create the integration, providing a fast track for solution partners to build the solutions customers need.

This integration package includes the source code of a sample tool that shows how to import features and rules from Aras into Ace® using our XML import feature. This whitepaper explains high-level considerations to the integration between Aras Innovator and Ace®.

Contact us to learn more
aras logo horizontal

SAP S/4 HANA integration with Configit Ace®

SAP is known in the industry for their solutions across customer’s value chains, while Configit Ace® is setting industry standards on how to work with configuration lifecycle management. With Configit Ace®, customers can now extract configurable products with pricing information from SAP S/4 HANA and make them available in sales configurators across sales channels. This provides accurate pricing and product information available for CPQ integration.

The sales configurator solutions run on our secure and highly scalable Ace® platform that can be deployed in the cloud and provides superior performance and best-in-class configuration experience.

Contact us to learn more
SAP logo