CONFIGURABLE PRODUCTS − LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FINNISH INDUSTRY Juha Tiihonen, Timo Soininen, Tomi Männistö, and Reijo Sulonen Helsinki University of Technology TAI Research Centre, Product Data Management Group P.O. Box 9555, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland Email: Juha.Tiihonen@hut.fi ABSTRACT 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. KEYWORDS Product configuration; configurators; configuration experiences; survey 1. Introduction and definition of configurable products Configurable products are important for industries that offer products adapted according to customer requirements. Information systems that support the customer specific adaptation, i.e. product configurators, are an interesting subject for research (see e.g.[1]). However, in our view product configuration is a much broader research area. The success of applying a configurator depends on the related business issues, products, processes, organizations and practices. Only through understanding these issues can configurators and configurable products be applied to their full potential. Such understanding is also valuable for developing configurators. This paper reports experiences on configurable products gained in co-operation with Finnish companies. The results are largely based on an in-depth survey of ten companies[2]. Some experiences are derived from close co-operation with half a dozen other companies that use or plan to use product configurators. The companies were interested in developing their processes, products, information systems and knowledge management related to product configura- tion. They were neither a random sample nor a collection of state-of-the-art companies. Our definition of the basic properties of configurable products is as follows: • The product has been pre-designed to meet a given range of different customer requirements. • Each delivered product individual is adapted to the needs of a customer. • Each product individual is specified as an arrangement of pre-designed components. Thus, there is no need to design new components as a part of the sales-delivery process. • The product has a pre-designed architecture. • No creative or innovative design is needed as a part of the sales-delivery process. Rather, a product individual can be specified in a routine manner. This definition coincided with how the companies perceived configurable products.