When Dell first allowed customers to configure PCs online in 1996, they revolutionized e-commerce. No longer limited to pre-boxed solutions, buyers could customize their computer over the Internet.

Today, customers expect manufacturers to offer products configurable to their needs and to specify them in "Internet-time."

CustomCommerce's product configurator allows your customers, sales staff and design engineers to easily assemble and customize product solutions.

Responsiveness is key to a configurator's success. To engage users, CustomCommerce's product configurator transparently provides an ultra-compact client-side application that minimizes server traffic and maximizes interactivity.

Key features include:

• Flagging incompatible options and highlighting prior options that are incompatible with the current option.
• Providing context-appropriate help messages and up and cross-selling suggestions.
• Providing graphics and animations to aid in the product configuration process, including 2D drawings, 3D models and dimensionally accurate, downloadable CAD files.
• Supporting the use of spatial relationships and rules for product configuration, allowing the layout and assembly of multiple products.
• Supporting soft constraints that allow a product to be configured but issue a warning, e.g. "special order required."
• Supporting the import of external and legacy configuration data and rules into CustomCommerce product configuration models.
• Supporting complex pricing models that allow multiple price lists to be associated with any product option, including customer-specific pricing and tiered discounting.

As part of a comprehensive solution, CustomCommerce's selection tools, including parametric search, make it easy for your customers to find the right products to configure.

Using TechniCon's interactive 3D product visualization, customers can rotate, tilt and magnify product images. Customers can "visually configure" products by interactively selecting and displaying different finishes, colors, sizes and other options.

TechniCon's visual configuration capabilities support a wide range of applications, such as the ability to generate photorealistic planogram images for retail store layouts or see a visually-accurate image of a custom sign as it's being configured.

As options are selected, the configurator can build "smart part numbers" for automatically entering orders into ERP systems. These numbers are parsed to provide the parametric information needed to produce a product.

Once products are configured, CustomCommerce can generate order-ready quotes and bills of materials (BOM). The configurator can access the latest product and pricing information from ERP and other back-end systems to ensure quote and BOM accuracy.

Every product that is configured needs to be ordered. The product configurator ensures that configurations are valid, orders are entered correctly and customers get the products they specified.

For complex products, a configurator must be able to support potentially thousands of options, rules and constraints. Your ability to manage your configuration system is critical.

ContentStudio makes setting configurator constraints as easy as point and click. "And/or" relationships can be defined for product options by simply checking boxes in automatically-generated constraint tables.