CCE ConfigLink

If you are a company making custom products, you cannot ignore the inordinate amount of time your engineering team spends validating each sales opportunity (new design variant) that comes through the door. As a company with highly configurable products, this is not difficult to imagine because it is imperative that all custom configurations requested by the customer are checked for inconsistencies & design feasibility before you get back to the customer with a quote and delivery schedule.

The lack of any form of design automation to create multiple configurations of your design eventually adds up to the cost and competitiveness of your product. With ConfigLink, we automate creating design configurations/variants, thereby saving valuable time off your “mass customization” engineering process.

ConfigLink is a design automation software for highly configurable product families. It is a product configurator that dramatically reduces the time to generate custom designs for highly configurable product families. Based on design rules defined during the "Authoring" stage, new design variants can be created in the "Configuring" stage, in a fraction of the time it would normally take for the engineering department to re-master the data. The result is a 3D model of the new variant & associated 2D drawing – which essentially forms the “core” of any Configure-To-Order (CTO) or Engineer-To-Order (ETO) process. ConfigLink currently supports SolidWorks and Pro/ENGINEER files.

ConfigLink’s simple web-centric licensing mechanism and automatic software updates makes software deployment, maintenance and management very simple.

ConfigLink essentially has 2 modules viz. AuthorMasterDesign & CreateConfiguration that are licensed separately. The user must have at least one license of each module to create configurations.

In the AuthorMasterDesign module, the design “administrator” captures and specifies the rules & constraints within which all “new variants” must be created. The administrator can set rules to specify certain values, ranges of values etc. Once the rules are set, the administrator can save the “authored” design. Files can be opened from disk or directly from the CAD session.In the CreateConfiguration module, the engineer uses the “authored” design and specifies custom values to create the new design variant.

Both modules use a simple form-based user interface. There is no programming knowledge required to use ConfigLink or work with its user interface.

Support for multiple CAD formats: ConfigLink currently supports SolidWorks & Pro/ENGINEER files. Users can use a single license to configure data from multiple CAD systems/formats.

Reduce Design time: Dramatically reduces the engineering time to create custom designs.

Increases profitability: Automating the most time consuming part of the ETO/CTO process viz. generation of 3D & 2D, results in significant cost savings and hence increased profitability.

Lower CAD Resource Utilization: Since ConfigLink does not need access to the CAD license continuously, significant cost savings result from a lower CAD resource utilization.

Lower maintenance cost: ConfigLink does not store the configuration data (rules) in an external database or file but in the CAD model itself. This tight integration lowers the maintenance cost so prevalent while using complex databases & files.

Quick response to customer RFQs: Responses to customer queries can be expedited as custom design creation is largely automated as opposed to manual remastering.

Accelerate new product development: Engineering department will have more time to focus on designing new products than creating various configurations of existing design for sales.