Background

Configit's technology has been developed for interactive configuration of products with a broad understanding of products being either services or goods. It is based on the concept of a product model.

Technically, a product model consists of a set of parameters, a set of possible values for the parameters, and rules describing dependencies among the values.

Product configuration

A configurator can be built from a product model. The configurator will guide a user to make a selection of values for the parameters that is consistent with the rules. The guidance is typically formed as an interactive dialog where the configurator at any given time shows exactly what choices are valid when taking the previous choices into account, and updates this information each time the user makes a selection.

Using Configit's technology, the configurator can also be embedded in small hardware devices such as advanced industrial controllers. In such cases, the configurator supports efficient setup and installation by only providing the relevant parameters to the user and only showing relevant choices.

The players

Three parties are involved in a configurator: the developer of the product model, the maintainer of the product model, and the user of the configurator.

In an e-commerce application, the developer is typically a consultant which construct the initial product model together with persons who have the product knowledge. The maintainer (the "content owner") maintains the information in the product model as new parameter values are becoming possible or old parameter values are disappearing. The user is a customer or sales person configuring a product without having detailed product knowledge.

In a setup application, the developer and maintainer is typically a programmer who develops the embedded software for the device. The user is the person who is setting up the device in an installation.

In both cases, the product model is the link between the developer and the maintainer on one side and the configuration user on the other side.