Configit – management of variants

Configit is an interesting set of products, from a Danish company with an international presence, which addresses one particular issue – management of product variants. This is a subset of Configuration Management, I think, but (despite the name) Configit is not a general-purpose Configuration Management tool (perhaps its technology could enable such a tool, but that would be a different story).

So, what is Configit for? Well, imagine this use case. Suppose a utility/farming vehicle manufacturer (such as LandRover, perhaps) merges with a sports/performance car manufacturer (like Jaguar). Post merger it finds, to give just one example, that it has dozens of paint colours in its inventory, each with a name and inventory number, sometimes in both the utility and the performance ranges, sometimes not. And sometimes each range has similar colours, for purely historical reasons, which could be rationalised as one colour – one inventory item – as long as it was called, say, “Grass Green” in the Utility range and “British Racing Green” in the Performance range. Obviously, this situation is over complex (expensive) to manage, risky (perhaps you run out of British Racing Green paint when you still have Grass Green elsewhere in the inventory) and generally undesirable. And similar issues will apply to many other items in the inventory.

Another use case occurs within a product line. Even in the performance vehicle range, there will be family-friendly options not available on the sportier versions, either for marketing reasons (which may change) or engineering compatibility reasons (which probably won’t change). More complexity to manage, and there are obvious problems if Sales promises a customer a custom option that turns out to be unavailable.

A third use case is becoming increasingly common and affects all companies trading internationally. Each country may have different regulations affecting products sold in that country. Either you keep track of regulatory requirements by country (and, possibly, date – you may need to track future regulations, and products may need to only comply with the regulations in force at the date of sale) or you apply “worst case” regulation to everything. Being unable to manage regulatory variants effectively may result in huge legal costs and business-limiting fines.

There is clearly a business issue to manage here and several non-optimal solutions. You can rely on sales staff to keep track of all the configurable options on a spreadsheet – risky, error-prone, not scalable, and needlessly stressful for your staff. You can ignore the problem, rely on customers to ask for the correct option, and try to make every product compatible with all configuration options – possibly infeasible, probably wasteful, and a significant victory for “unmanaged risk”. Particularly for regulatory variants, you may try to support the most restrictive model found internationally, everywhere – which may well not work, and may make your product uncompetitive in less restrictive markets. And, in all cases, managing configuration options will probably slow you down.

The best choice is to automate the management of configuration variants properly with Configuration Lifecycle Management, and the help of a product like Configit, which claims that:

• “Our customers create highly configurable products while reducing the time from product design, to sales, to manufacturing by up to 95%”.
• “Our solution provides a shared source of truth that helps companies get to market faster and achieve a seamless lifecycle for their configurable products”.

After talking to Henrik Hulgaard, co-founder and VP of Product Management at Configit, I think that these claims are entirely plausible (although “up to” is not the same as “typically” and I’d like to see the distribution of time saved). I suspect that maximum success with Configit comes with customer maturity, that is with the sort of customers that do something, measure the results, and fine-tune their actions as a result.

Configit has been around since 2000, and its products are available on a SaaS model. It has about 180 employees and over 200 (mostly large enterprise) customers worldwide. There is a Configit Academy, which helps customers develop core competencies in Configuration Lifecycle Management – I like this. It has a strong partner network with key partners such as NVIDIA, Unity, PwC, Infosys and more. It is owned by Polaris Private Equity.

Configit’s core competence comes from its Virtual Tabulation technology, which is (in essence) a low-code rules-based system with built-in constraint solving (it doesn’t matter in what order you put the rules in) and a compact format which lets you keep valid configurations in memory. It is available as the Configit Ace configuration platform and Configit Quote for managing complex products.

What is Configuration Lifecycle Management, writ large, then? According to Configit, it seamlessly integrates CRM (Customer Relationship Management), PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) and ERP (Enterprise resource planning); and it provides a single source of Configuration Truth. This helps to align Engineering, Sales, Services and Manufacturing around a model of the configuration options and enhances Collaboration. Fundamentally, however, it is all about managing and controlling configuration complexity, in pursuit of more effective, faster, delivery.

OK, so what are Configit’s issues? First of all, I think, is that CLM is best introduced to a company from the start, but Hulgaard admits that it is usually introduced following a configuration debacle. Well, this isn’t really up to Configit, but it could help future customers with low-cost trial versions and so on. It does reflect on the maturity of potential customers, perhaps.

Another possible issue is that Configuation Lifecycle Management becomes an end in itself, a silo, and isn’t fully integrated with the production process as a whole, probably for political reasons (or even management egos). Again, this is a customer maturity issue, and all Configit can do is to provide training and employ good partners, that can help customers manage organisational change. Even a very basic installation of Configit will probably deliver benefits for the management of variants, but you usually won’t get all the possible benefits claimed without managing the concomitant changes to the organisation. The Configit Academy should help here.

My final concern is that Configuration Lifecycle Management may be seen purely as something for large enterprises and, as that is where the money is, I doubt if that worries Configit very much. However, it would be good if CLM was built onto a company from the very start, even when it is small enough to not really need it, so it can scale up seamlessly as the company grows. I think that Configit’s SaaS story helps here, although I’m not sure how much it targets small customers that might grow.

In summary, I think that automation for Configuration Lifecycle Management is a useful thing. I imagine that some PLM systems will provide a limited approach to this, but that a specialist tool will be more effective, as long as it integrates well with other tools, such as PLM. Our recommendation is that you should certainly be implementing automation to support Configuration Lifecycle Management, if you haven’t already; and that Configit is well worth looking at.