Better End-To-End Customer Experiences
by Addressing Complexity Bottlenecks
New APIs and capabilities addressing integration, validation and post-sales challenges
Facilitating a Smooth Customer Experience Throughout the Product Lifecycle
Modern products and services provide a range of options and customizations that provide value to customers. But this comes at a complexity cost that can make it more difficult to integrate with other systems, identify why APIs are not working or why configurations are no longer valid.
Ensuring a smooth customer experience requires complexity bottlenecks to be addressed not only in development, but also in deployment, maintenance, support and service. This ensures better customer experiences throughout the lifecycle of the product.
The latest release of Configit Ace® provides new APIs and capabilities that address complexity challenges removing bottlenecks to implementation, API integration and validation. It also incudes powerful capabilities for resolving issues with configurations that are no longer valid during product upgrades and maintenance.
Faster Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) Integration and Validation
Configit Ace® provides a single source of truth for product- and system-configurations that can be accessed by PLM, ERP, MES and CRM systems.
However, integrating systems to support complex configuration models can be challenging. Configit has identified some of the key challenges and bottlenecks to smoother customers experiences and provides new capabilities in Configit Ace® to address them.
Highlighting API Changes
It is not uncommon for 100s or even 1,000s of product models to be supported in Configit Ace®. As models are added or changed, it is more efficient to update only what has changed rather than all models in integrated downstream systems.
Configit Ace® now provides an API that identifies changes made to product models enabling faster and more efficient updates of downstream systems.
SAP Pricing Integration and Validation
When building a sales configurator using SAP prices integrated in Configit Ace®, it can be difficult to debug issues during development. Is it the API or are the SAP prices correctly updated in Configit Ace®?
Configit Ace® now integrates the SAP pricing model and rules in the Ace® Verify module enabling developers to confirm that SAP prices and rules are up to date in Configit Ace®.
Faster Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) Post-sales Maintenance and Support
Configit Ace® supports the full configuration lifecycle for all product models defined, including post-sales tasks. This includes support of released products, upgrades and updates of deployed products, as well maintenance and replacement of defective products. Many deployed products and services have lifetimes over several years and even decades. This can lead to challenges in upgrading and servicing products with configurations that are no longer valid.
Identifying the Cause of Invalid Configurations
When upgrading or servicing a product with an invalid product configuration, it can be difficult to see which options or components are no longer supported.
Configit Ace® now provides a Minimal Conflict Set API that provides a list of feature conflicts. This can be used to identify features that are causing the conflict.
Explaining Invalid Configurations
When validating a product configuration, it can be useful to know why a specific configuration is not valid. What are the rules or constraints that are leading to the error?
Configit Ace® now provides an API that provides information on which rules and constraints are leading to the configuration error and in which system they are defined.
Better End-To-End Customer Experience Resources
How to Improve Customer Experience and Sales Performance – CLM Use Cases
Jens Ellebæk presents use-cases that demonstrate how an enterprise-grade sales configurator can improve customer experience by simplifying sales, improving efficiency and savings.
Enabling Better Post-sales Customer Experiences with CLM – by Henrik Reif Andersen
Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) facilitates better customer experiences throughout the product lifecycle, especially for post-sales activities, which can often be overlooked.
