Tacton Configurator - Sales Configuration Support
by Lars Bergman
Matching customer requirements with combinations of components
from a configurable products line is the core of the Tacton Configurator.
As many companies are moving from selling products to selling
systems this is a very important area for improving sales efficiency
and effectiveness. Tacton Configurator has been developed within
SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, in the period of
1992 to 1997. The first industrialized version was released 1997.
In 1998 a spin-off company, Tacton Systems, was established. Today
the new company employs 15 people as a result of a flying start
and rapid expansion. Main customers are four business units of
Ericsson where some of the applications are in broad use.
When selling a complex system, as for instance telephone switching
systems, composition of the ‘right’ system as viewed from customer
needs and pricing is often a matter of weeks traditionally. Required
is a mass of product information and input from knowledgeable
people. With an application based on Tacton Configurator the reported
time for configuring and pricing is reduced to seconds. This in
turn has impact on the vendor competitiveness in a sales situation
as well as it gives considerably improved efficiency in the sales
process.
Generic Software
Tacton Configurator is a generic off-the-shelf software. It is
adapted by creating a product configuration model and by connecting
to other relevant software. The model is built by using a component
oriented modelling language to describe configurable and fixed
components at all levels as well as the properties of the components.
Also the conditions for configuration has to be described in the
model, as well as the parameters of customer requirements which
are used to drive the end-user dialogue.
Research Base
Tacton Configurator is the result of research and development
in the ISL, Intelligent Systems Laboratory within SICS, where
the configurator was called Obelics. Domains to be mentioned are
logic programming and constraints programming. The powerful and
efficient programming systems SICStus Prolog and Oz, have been
the enabling tools for the Obelics development. The research group
makes the core of the new spin-off company, Tacton Systems, with
Klas Orsvärn as the managing director who defended his thesis
on ‘Knowledge Modelling with Libraries of Task Decomposition Methods’
in 1996. The Tacton website can be found at http://www.tacton.com
Please contact:
Klas Orsvärn - Tacton Systems
Tel: +46 8 690 07 50
E-mail: info@tacton.com
