What is Array sales and product configuration?

Array sales and product configuration is a software suite that enables your organization to do much more with less resources.  Using our software helps you increase sales by employing up-sell and cross-sell, reducing sales transaction costs, improving quote-to-cash processes, decreasing time-to-market and increasing productivity by bridging the gap between Sales and Manufacturing. The customer needs and requirements are identified and turned into valid and accurate customized product specifications that are used for automatic proposal and quote generation, price calculation, visualization, documentation, and manufacturing.

All possible valid variants of any product or service offering are specified and validated based on a vast amount of business knowledge such as product and business logic, technical and legal restrictions, market and customer conditions as well as any other kind of business rules inflicting the product or service offering.

Why do I need Array sales and product configuration?

Whether you have a simple or complex product offering, you will benefit from Array sales and product configuration suite if you can say "yes" to one or more of the following statements:

• We spend much time on handling requests for customized product variants
• Our product knowledge is not well documented or is stored in an unstructured format
• Maintenance of our existing product rules in ERP or an existing configurator solution is difficult and cumbersome
• Proposals and quotes are created manually
• Price calculation is a comprehensive or complex manual process
• Quotes are manually converted to orders
• Bill-Of-Material lists for orders are manually created
• We want to let partners and customers place orders at our web-site
• We are continuously introducing new product offerings

Array Technology can help you overcome the obstacles of all the above statements and the effects will quickly be obvious for the entire organization. Our customers have achieved a range of convincing results by implementing the Array sales and product configuration suite to:

• Generate extra revenue by improved cross-selling and up-selling
• Lower costs from sales rep to factory floor
• Increase productivity by optimizing quote-to-cash processes such as: 
  • speeding up proposal and quoting process by automatic generation
  • making it easy to convert from quote to order
  • automating Bill-Of-Material (BOM) generation "on the fly"
  • automating intelligent workflow
• Ensure accuracy and consistency in quotes and orders
• Eliminate bottlenecks in sales and technical support functions
• Instantly implement and offer new products and changes to existing product portfolio
• Reduce business risks by documenting critical business knowledge in a structured format
• Increase customer retention by lower complaint rate and improved customer satisfaction

 

Who can use Array sales and product configuration?

Array Technology covers the entire range of sales and product configuration with our targeted software suites - from the simple products or services to the very advanced and complex product ranges.

Enterprises offering customizable products or services regardless the scope of offering complexity will greatly benefit from our software suite to correctly specify, offer and sell valid product variants that match the customer needs.

Array sales and product configuration is a cross-functional suite of tools often widely used simultaneously in different departmental units such as Sales, Customer Service/Support, Marketing, Product Management, R&D, Manufacturing, Logistics , After Sales, Finance, and IT.

What differentiates Array Technology from other suppliers?

The corner stone of Array Technology is to solve complexity in a simple and intelligent way for all stake-holders.  This influences all aspects of what we do - software design and development, product modeling, integration to legacy systems, and design of user interfaces. Our approach to simplicity was recognized by Microsoft in 2006 with the award for minimalistic design.

Below some of the major advantages of Array Technology compared to competition is highlighted:

1. Rule creation and maintenance:
   We believe that data and programming code should be separated as this enables our customers to obtain substantial savings. Domain experts can create even very complex rules by simple tables, matrices, symbolic relations and formulas in the Array sales and product configuration suite - simply by using import tools from existing ERP systems, drag & drop and simple point and click operations.
   
   The non code approach to rule creation is very powerful and intuitive as the data relationships are presented in tables or matrices that everybody can read and understand. 
   
   Often the product data already exist in the form of tables throughout the organization hence it significantly speeds up the product modeling process. 
   
   At the same time, our approach to rule design is highly flexible to accommodate even radical and structural data changes. Therefore, the domain experts can concentrate on defining and maintaining the product domain in their own language without any need for IT programming skills or involvement of the IT department for knowledge transfer. Whenever product changes occur, the domain expert can make the changes and deploy the update instantly to the users - without the need for involving IT. The results are remarkable savings in application "time to market" and "total cost of ownership". Documentation of the product models can be created on-the-fly enabling domain experts or even non-domain experts to verify and validate the modeling in an easy to read format. Many competitive configuration solutions use a pseudo programming language or even a real programming language to construct the product domain, which requires substantial training in order to master.
   
   This slows down the entire product modeling creation and maintenance process as you have to adapt your world to the system. Moreover, competitive solution often lack the same level of flexibility in rule creation as we offer - when a certain structure is in place it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make any changes to this structure in competitive solutions. A totalrewrite of the product modeling is then often the only alternative.
   
   
2. Testing and simulation:
   
   We enable domain experts to perform advanced testing and "what if" simulations of the logic product models before deployment to users hence avoiding "trial-and-error" testing in the production environment. Our software automatically checks and presents logical faults, contradictions, bounded variables, tautologies, and unused variables. This ensures that the product models are verified and validated automatically before being deployed to the user environment - the user will never be able to configure an unsafe or invalid product specification. Various query functions are also available enabling the domain experts to verify any possible relations between the variables, even also for implicit relations. Often the competitive solutions, especially ERP, do not have any testing and simulation environment - product updates are therefore often deployed directly to the production environment after only a simple and very limited manual "trial-and-error" testing attempts. At such, with competitive configuration solutions there is no guarantee that users will be prevented from configuring illegal product specifications causing significant extra administrative re-work and customer dissatisfaction. This is especially true for systems that rely on a specific sequence of logic.
   
   
3. Scalability
   
   Our software is used by some of our customers for solving large-scale domains with more than 10.000 variables and billions of combinations. At the same time we can calculate and guarantee a fast and predictable response time in runtime, even for large-scale domains. It will rarely take a few milliseconds to determine the effects and consequences of any product feature selection performed by the user and oftenless than a millisecond. Competing solutions will, if they at all can handle complex or large-scale domains, often become much slower in response time as the product domains increases or becomes more complex. As they are often based on heuristic search algorithms, all rules and constraints needs to be processed at runtime meaning that "dead-lock" / "no solution" situations are likely to happen, especially for large-scale or complex domains. Moreover, the heuristic search configuration solutions will not be able to predict the worst case response time in runtime.
   
   
4. Deployment flexibility and integration:
   
   We can extract any existing product data and rules automatically from a vast number of backend systems into the Array sales and product configuration suite. The configuration solutions created can easily be integrated to, or even embedded within, existing legacy applications e.g. ERP/CRM/CMS systems, visualization engines, etc.  by using the open and simple design of the Array APIs.
   
   When the product domain has been created in the Array sales and product configuration suite, the outcome is an extremely compact file usable by any system, application or channel. This means that product knowledge is only maintained in a single place but re-used and synchronized in a vast number of places even with their own specific user interface - i.e. product guidance on a website, printed or electronic product catalogs and datasheets, Excel pricelists, competitor benchmark, quotes, proposals and orders, Bill-Of-Material list for production, generation of CAD drawings, etc. all use the same logic from the same Array file. Whenever the product knowledge is changed, the updates are instantly implemented throughout the organization in all systems ensuring the same verified knowledge is accessible everywhere. Competitive ERP solutions will often "lock" the use of the product models to the ERP environment hence further deployment is not possible causing redundant and unsynchronized product knowledge throughout the organization with extra administrative work and cost. 
   
   
5. Runtime:
   
   The Array sales and product configuration solution can calculate and guarantee a fast and predictable response time in runtime, even for large-scale domains. Moreover, only valid solutions are presented in the runtime as any modeling errors, contradictions, and similar are identified during design time before any deployment to the production environment.  At runtime the user can start anywhere in the product configuration process, there is no forced sequence to follow. The user is always safely navigated through the vast number of valid combinations and will never experience any "dead-locks". If the user tries to violate any rules, the advanced conflict resolution makes sure that the user is guided back to a legal state in the easiest and least time consuming way and is further explained why the choice is not possible. Because the complete solution space is known, the runtime environment also knows exactly what choices are in conflict, and presents the user with legal alternatives to the choices already made. Unlike many other business rules engines the user does not need to step back to a state where the desired choice is legal, potentially undoing a lot of choices that have had no impact on the conflict. This way the user is guided safely and fast through providing the most possible information in a consistent and correct way. Therefore, the Array runtime environment has fundamental advantages over other technologies because it can solve conflicts where they occur and even solve conflicts that are derived from a combination of rules not explicitly expressed by the domain experts.

Benefits of Array sales and product configuration suite

Functional area	Benefits
Business analysts / domain experts	Easy non-programming approach to writing rules Central rule repository Advanced simulation and "what-if" scenarios Consistency by design Documentation of corporate knowledge No need for knowledge transfer between Business analysts / domain experts and IT developers Deployment without involving IT department
IT	Removes complexity from application design Few generic method calls Deployment protection of business logic from reverse engineering Extremely small memory footprint even for large scale domains Comprehensive support for legacy data Well proven and tested technology Easy integration
End-users	Simple navigation with guided advisors Arbitrary selection order Automatically trigger suggestions and alternatives Advanced conflict resolution Completeness and correctness Fast response time (real-time)
Corporate business	Optimization of business processes /li> Greater operational efficiency Wider usage of documented business knowledge Shorten Time-to-Market Advanced intelligence gathered Lower cost of sales transactions Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) High Return Of Investment (ROI)