Using Microsoft Dynamics AX Product Configurator in an engineer-to-order environment

As the world has changed from Henry Ford's mass production model where a customer could have a car painted any color that he wanted so long as it was black to a mass customization production model where customers now expect to have anything they want, the line between configure-to-order (CTO) and engineer-to-order (ETO) is blurring. This creates some complexity as the worlds of ERP and ETO companies has never really gotten along.

The ERP world, with a large portion of its value in a production environment coming from materials resource planning (MRP), relies on accurately defined production routings, bills of materials (BoMs), and lead times. These don't exist in most ETO environments. When every item you build has never been built before, how can you leverage the value of an ERP system?

This article discusses how to use the Microsoft Dynamics AX product configurator, even as your customers demand more and more customization. 

Microsoft Dynamics AX Product Configurator

Like almost all product configurators, the principles behind Dynamics AX's configurator are quite simple. You begin with creating some variables called attributes. Values are assigned to those variables either directly by the user or using some logic, called constraints. A BoM and production routes are then created based on values assigned to these attributes. The BoM and production routes that are created are valid for a specific configuration of the item.

Just like with a programming language, the attributes each has a variable type.  Attributes can be lists of strings, integers, or decimals, for example. It is important to remember that the setting of attributes is the only time that the end user will have any input to the product configuration model. If the user ...