The Transition to a Configurator Based Design Process

Abstract

University student internships can be an important pre-professional experience for the student and be an immense benefit to an employer. Because of the findings of a 6-Sigma project to reduce engineering errors, a design configurator was to be rebuilt to include updated design information and expanded product coverage. Lacking available full time employees to support the project a team of mostly engineering graduate students were hired for intern positions and tasked with rebuilding this critical application

A design configurator is an expert system that programmatically applies design rules to create a product configuration based on user inputs. This paper summarily reviews BOM basics and describes how a configurator was “reverse engineered” by university students by data mining BOM data previously generated in an ETO like environment.