Taking the Sting Out of Customized Products: How Two Dynamics ERP Customers Found the Right ISV Configurators to Ease Manufacturing, Processing, Ordering

Customized products are inherently difficult to produce, buy, and sell, because there are so many variations.  Manufacturers strive for efficient ways to meet their customers' ordering needs, whether it is with a consumer e-commerce system, B2B e-commerce, streamlined channel sales, or other approaches. 

For Microsoft Dynamics customers with seriously complex and often unique configurator requirements, but without their own development team to build such a system from the ground up, most seem to agree that ISV solutions are the only sensible option with the latest Dynamics product releases. Especially since Microsoft's configuator options may not fit the bill for many Dynamics users.

About three years ago, window and door manufacturer Kinro Inc. was moving to the Dynamics NAV platform of its sister company, Lippert Components Inc., a steel manufacturing company. But Kinro also needed strong product configuration capabilities that integrated with Dynamics NAV.

"Our challenge wasn't so much we were looking for a way to streamline the configurator process or to give end users their own ability to configure something and get that data to efficiently to us so we could process it with controls-although that came in as a nice aftermath," said Seth DeBriere, Lippert Director of IT Applications. "[Kinro] were using [a configurator] but we had to get them onto NAV and we realized we needed a NAV configurator. But at the time, NAV configurator solutions were limited."

For Dynamics AX customer Seneca Data, a custom computer manufacturer and distributor, replacing their current configurator solution built using Product Builder and Enterprise Portal was a key requirement of their Dynamics AX 2009 upgrade.

"We're going through an upgrade from AX 3.0 to AX 2009," said Walter ...