For the majority of industrial companies, customizing products and services is among the most critical means to deliver true customer value and achieve superior competitive advantage. The challenge is not to customize products and services in itself – but to do it in a profitable way. The implementation of a product configuration system is among the most powerful ways of achieving this in practice, offering a reduction of the lead time for products and quotations, faster and more qualified responses to customer inquiries, fewer transfers of responsibility and fewer specification mistakes, a reduction of the resources spent for the specification of customized products, and the possibility of optimizing the products according to customer demands.

This book presents an operational procedure for the design of product configuration systems in industrial companies, based on the experience gained from more than 40 product configuration projects in companies providing customer tailored products and services.