Product Configuration in the Framework of the Virtual Enterprise Jan Goossenaerts(1), Ad Aerts(2), Florin Filip(3), Carmen Sauer(3) (1)
Dept. of Industrial Engineering and Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands; e-mail:
[email protected] (2) Dept. of Mathematics and Comp. Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O.Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands; e-mail:
[email protected] (3) Research Institute for Informatics, 8-10, Averescu, 71316 Bucharest, Romania email:
[email protected],
[email protected]
Abstract: This papers describes an experiment in which a variant configuration service based upon a generic bill-of-material is developed as a prototype web-application accessing product data stored in distributed databases. The web accessible configuration process is regarded as a value added service which allows customers to activate production processes of virtual enterprises. Keywords: virtual enterprise, generic bill of material, product configuration, value added service.
Introduction The Extended Enterprise is essentially the formation of closer co-ordination in the design, development, costing and the respective manufacturing schedules of co-operating independent manufacturing enterprises. [1] This has been enormously facilitated by the availability of latest technologies - particularly in the area of electronics and telecommunications. The need for open markets, reductions for trade barriers and improvements in transportation and communication led to a situation where local competition and markets operate in the context of global standards. This open infrastructure allows manufacturers to respond to changing markets by building Extended Enterprises across the whole value chain. The application that is presented in this paper demonstrates the potential of the open infrastructure also for the customer. Indeed, concepts of generic bill of material and product families, and their use in product configuration processes, can be put at the service of the customer searching for the product that best fits his requirements. The idea is that a customer configures a product, and that the configuration system in turn configures and controls the corresponding business process of a virtual enterprise, made up of the manufacturers that are capable to deliver within certain budget and space/time constraints. The customer thus takes a leading part in the specification of the product to be manufactured, as opposed to the situation where companies manufacture finished products, which have their own fixed bill-of-material. A generic bill-of-material (GBOM) is a bill-of-material (BOM) for a whole product family. Such a generic bill-of-material can be represented by two entities, namely: a generic product and a generic bill-of-material relationship.[2] An initial application of the generic bill-of-material (GBOM) is the variant configuration which permits specification of a feasible variant that meets customer requirements. The product configuration process based upon generic BOM is regarded as a “value added service” which offers advantages to both suppliers and customers. It makes use of the mid 1990’s technology to build up a decentralised and communication-focused business climate. The demand is for applications that can be rapidly deployed and used throughout the organisation and outside the company by its partners, customers, and suppliers. The application we developed, a Web-application, therefore relies on platform-independent technologies and open standards of the Internet to run on any hardware and software platform that supports these standards. This new class of client-server applications is called network-centric applications. The configuration service fits well within the electronic commerce paradigm [3]. At the present state of development it is the secure link - a provider - between the customer and a conglomerate of manufacturing companies. In an expanded version it may cover the entire track of customer order up to control of the delivery
of the order and electronic billing and payment. In the GEN project, a detailed analysis has been made of roles of users, suppliers and the provider, techniques for data handling and communications, search and offering procedures [4]. In the GEN project these analyses have been made for catalogue supported searches of engineering components, with engineering processes supported at the client’s station. The vision in this paper is to put more services - a working environment for product configuration - at the provider.
The Configuration Service as a tier between Customers and Suppliers The basic model: Customer Viewpoint
Company
Customer
Configurator
Company
Fig. 1 Customer-oriented services of a configurator In order to find the “best value in the market” the customer wishes to search the catalogue of a number of companies, e.g. by alternative solutions for his/her requirements such as alternative materials, services, prices or delivery performance. The companies involved may compete or co-operate on the solutions. It is possible, of course, that a single company cannot meet the customers requirements. In this case the configurator could keep track (in a workspace for each customer who has activated a session) of the advances that have been made towards preparing the orders for compatible products and services that - in combination - would solve the customer’s request. As an illustration consider the ordering of furniture for an office room that will be opened on a certain date. The configurator could help the customer to assemble a “virtual office room”, keep track of total cost, allowed costs, prior to dispatching the orders for production and delivery of the goods. Advantages for the customer: The customer can access a single “site” offering the largest possible supplier base, with the expectation that his “own” problem will be solved, by making use of the best available marketsearch and configuration, and presentation functions. The configurator system can be a trusted party to him, i.e., it contractually commits to him that no detail of the “deal” will be disclosed to third parties. This may be important for such deals as those related to the furnishing of restaurants, shops, etc. The configurator is also a secure partner, communication with it is without risks for the customer.
The basic model: Company Viewpoint A configurator offers a company the service to expose its capabilities to a wide customer base, with an attractive presentation for those customers (workspaces in which the customer can configure and browse alternative solutions to a problem). The configurator may access the product databases and GBOM’s of the company, but does this as a trusted party (contractually agreed). The configurator can use wrappers to access any kind of database, and this way present possible configurations to the customer in a uniform, state-of-the-
art fashion. In this way the configurator frees the company of the need to follow service-trends. Simultaneously it can assure state-of-the-art presence on the market. Advantages for the company: The company can achieve wide visibility to customers for a low cost. The configurator can offer its capabilities in a customer-oriented fashion. The company does not need to open its in-house systems to virtually everyone - with resulting security risks - but instead only has to deal with the configurator system, a single trusted party, with contractually agreed levels of security and confidentiality (no details on products, performance or orders will be disclosed to third parties, etc.).
Company
Company
Configurator
Company
Customers Fig. 2 Company-oriented services of a configurator Detailed Design of the Configurator The configurator service should bring customers and manufacturers into contact with one another by making descriptions of the products the latter offers, available to the former. The service should allow manufacturers, who wish to participate in it, to publish the descriptions of their product families (generic bill of material, product family data, parameters, specialities, ...). The manufacturer should be able to maintain the descriptions by updating information, adding and deleting parts of it, and announcing new product families, as appears fit. The product-database may be maintained at the provider site, as part of the service to the manufacturer. In order to make the product data accessible the configurator needs to publish a catalogue of products together with the manufacturers who offer them. It needs to maintain a list of product-family/supplier couples. This (support) information needs to be kept and maintained at the configurator site. Manufacturers need to communicate to the configurator what products they have available and when their offerings change. To improve the quality of its service, the configurator needs to keep track of not only the successful transactions with customers, but also of transactions that have been broken off by the customer before completion. This may be done in the form of customer workspaces.
Use cases for the basic sessions A customer who accesses the configurator to order products has to go through the following basic steps: 1. Choose a product 2. Choose a manufacturer 3. Configure the product 4. Order the product In the first step the customer is presented with a catalogue of products that can be ordered through the service. Some of these products may be sold off the shelf, some of them may be customised. In this paper we focus on the latter variety. In order to facilitate the selection of a product (for example to overcome language barriers)
the service may include pictures showing representative examples of the product. When a product is offered by more than one manufacturer additional information may be included, such as a price range, and delivery and payment conditions. This information forms the basis for the second step: the selection of a manufacturer. In case the customer doesn't want to proceed he can quit the service. Once a product(type) and a manufacturer, offering the product, have been chosen, the customer is ready to start the configuration of the product in step three. In this step a number of options are presented, from general to specific. General options refer to parameters that affect the product as a whole, such as the model, or the overall colour. Specific options depend on more general options. For instance, a popular model may have a larger variety of options available than a less popular one. A customer may specify his choices in an iterative fashion, in the sense that previous choices may be undone, in which case all dependent choices have to be specified again. The selection of options again may be supported by offering the customer insight into the consequences of picking a particular configuration, with respect to such aspects as delivery time and pricing. In addition a graphical overview may be presented to give the customer insight in the options available. In the fourth step the customer makes a choice by confirming the order or by quitting the configuration process. In both cases the dialogue resumes in step one, where the customer can decide to order another product or quit. Step four may be supported at various stages of step three. One alternative is to allow the customer to place an order before all options have been fixed. In that case the configurator will complete the order by selecting default values for the options left open by the customer. The alternative we implemented is to interpret an incomplete order as a cancelled order. A manufacturer has the following options: 1. Choose a product 2. Modify the product definition In step one the manufacturer specifies a product that he is offering. In case of an existing product, the product may be deleted from the service or may be modified in step two. In case the product is deleted, the manufacturer remains in step one and may pick another product or quit the service. In case of a new product, the general properties of the product may be specified and the details of the product may be added in step two. In step two the manufacturer is allowed to modify the definition of the product chosen in the previous step. This may involve defining new generic components or parameters and giving them a place in the generic bill of material of the product or by defining new variants of the product. Components, parameters and variants may also be deleted or modified. Care is taken to keep the product definition consistent. After modifying the product definition the manufacturer may apply or cancel the modifications and return to step one. At present no customer logging takes place.
Experience with the Demonstrator In the demonstrator project a limited version of the configurator was constructed. The emphasis in this project was placed on the configuration process itself and on the use of web technology. The set-up we used was as follows. Two manufacturers were included, offering the same product: an office chair with a number of options, such as colour, with or without wheels, swivel or armrests. [2] No pricing information was included. Because only one product is available, no catalogue is presented and the customer is led to the choice of the manufacturer right away. The configuration process is supported by offering the customer an overview of the product structure and a list of options to choose from. Each option that is fixed is removed from the list of options and the choice is added to a separate list showing the choices made so far. The manufacturer is supported by providing a choice of definitions already present in the system (all for the office chair). After selecting a part of the product definition the manufacturer can add or delete pieces of it and in this way change the options available to a customer. The Configurator product was developed in an environment that takes advantage of the client-server, distributed and Web-oriented features of the network-centric applications. This environment is made up of two
components of Netscape’s SuiteSpot product: the Enterprise Server and the LiveWire application development environment [5], and Oracle 7 databases [6]. The Netscape SuiteSpot servers are built on Netscape ONE technology. ONE (Open Network Environment) is based on publicly defined open standards and key technologies, like: HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language), Java and Javascript1.1, Netscape Internet Foundation Classes, IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol), HTTP for document and application retrieval, NNTP for discussions and workgroup computing, SMTP and POP3 for messaging, SSL 3.0 for encrypted communication. A typical Netscape ONE application consists of a client component and one or more server components that interact with the client through a set of common interfaces. Netscape Enterprise Server is a powerful Java-enabled Web server that manages and publishes content and executes on-line applications. Netscape LiveWire is a visual development environment for creating live content with database connectivity. The LiveWire applications can access databases from Informix, Oracle, Sybase, and many others through the Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC) standard. The LiveWire applications are client-server applications that run over the Internet or internal networks and are developed on Netscape’s Javascript scripting language. The Configurator application was developed in the LiveWire environment using Javascript and the LiveWire facilities to connect to databases and the means of communication of the Enterprise server. The production data are stored in two Oracle databases, one located in the Netherlands and the other in Romania. For the distributed product configurator to be successful, the system should be constructed using platform independent technology. The accessibility of the service should not be limited by proprietary technology, but benefit from open standards. Some of the benefits of using Server Side Javascript versus CGI programs consist of the fact that LiveWire offers the same programming language for server and client side scripting, Javascript requires less overhead than CGI - it does not require another process to run the program, C libraries can be called from within Javascript programs, and Javascript has built in ability to track a client's state so that it does not require extensive programming. Javascript has a number of predefined object classes that greatly simplify building simple applications that access databases. It has a strict separation between client side and server side scripts where transfer of information between the two sides requires Web-communication. This has security advantages, since a browser cannot inspect the server side scripts. On the other hand, it also complicates the realisation of more advanced functionality requiring frequent information exchange between the client and server parts of the application, such as the support of workspaces. Also the limited support for more advanced datatypes is a factor hampering application development. Compared to LiveWire and Javascript, the products that implement the JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity) specification to connect to remote and heterogeneous databases offer the support of Java programming language which has the advantages of a complete programming language. Three-tier architectures can be easily implemented by means of JDBC products. The LiveWire Architecture The LiveWire architecture is a client-server architecture. It can consist of two or three tiers. Our first implementation of the Configurator application had a two-tier architecture. It will be implemented a three-tier environment by means of logical links to distributed and remote databases. The three tiers are: • Netscape Navigator clients (WWW clients): this tier provides an end-user interface to the application; it can also contain some application logic, such as data validation rules implemented in JavaScript (clients can be inside or outside corporate firewalls). • Netscape WWW server: this tier consists of a Netscape server (in our case Enterprise server) with LiveWire; it contains the application logic, manages security, and controls multi-user access to the application; this tier allows clients both inside and outside the firewall to access the application.
•
Database server: this tier consists of SQL database servers, typically running on high-performance workstations; it contains all the data, metadata, and referential integrity rules required by the application; this tier typically will be inside the corporate firewall and can provide a layer of security in addition to that provided by the WWW server.
Netscape Navigator (WWW Clients)
Database servers
Netscape Server (database client)
LiveWire Application
Firewall
Fig.3 The LiveWire Architecture The present architecture for the Configurator product hosts the Enterprise server (together with LiveWire) and the Oracle7 database on the same Unix server.
Conclusions and Further work In line with growing customer-orientation on the market and focus on core competencies at companies, the idea of putting variant configuration services at specialised providers appears rather natural. Our exercise of building a web-based prototype of such a service has enabled an evaluation of an environment for developing web-based applications. Moreover the experiment has directed our attention towards new ways of exploiting emerging web technologies to the advantage of both the customer and the supplier. Further work will be concerned, on the one hand, with the use of a more advanced development environment (for Java using JDBC) , and on the other hand, with the extension of the functionality around the variant configuration process (user work spaces, user authentication, control and monitoring of manufacturing processes at customer-order-driven (defined) virtual enterprises, charging principles for the provider, life cycle support, etc.).
References 1. J. Browne (1996). The Extended Enterprise. ICIMS News, No.8-9, September, p.7. 2. Hegge, H.M.H. Intelligent Product Family Descriptions for Business Applications. Thesis at Eindhoven University of Technology Management, 1995.
3. R. Kalakota and A.B. Whinston, Frontiers of Electronic Commerce, Addison Wesley Publ. Co., 1996. 4. U. Rethfeld (1997). Global Engineering Networking: Vision, Status and Demo. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Global Engineering Networking (GEN’97, Antwerp, April 1997), HNIVerslagesschiftenreihe, Heinz Nixdorf Institut, Paderborn. 5. http://home.netscape.com/comprod/server_central/index.html 6. http://www.oracle.com
