Plus Pack operates two main facilities in Denmark and Belgium, and sells its products to customers...
What's unique about sales and product configuration in the heavy vehicles manufacturing industry (or in other words - CPQ for truck manufacturers)?
I might be the person that has analyzed and spoken to the most truck manufacturers in the world in relation to CPQ. I've met 7 out of the 10 largest truck corporations in the world.
I thought I might summarize the unique requirements of this industry:
Legacy
All truck manufacturers are heavy users of (semi-)old legacy systems. They have all been configuring their products since the 80-ies or 90-ies. This means that whatever system (and specifically CPQ) you introduce - it needs to be heavily adjusted to fit into the existing system landscape. Many of these systems are very specialized - and sometimes uniquely built for the manufacturers. Since they often old, good APIs may be missing.
Systemized BOM usage
It's quite common generally in the manufacturing industry to separate Engineering BOMs from Manufacturing BOMs. It's also getting common to introduce a Service BOM. Since truck companies have been working with configurable products for so many years - they've systemized the usage of multiple BOMs.
One thing that most truck manufacturers use is the concept of a Sales BOM (they might call it something else like 'Variant Codes'). The idea is to separate the 'As-sold' BOM from the 'As-delivered' BOM. This also separates engineering updates of BOM-items from Sales. So only when an engineering updates actually changes the function the customer receives - that's the Sales BOM item is updated. This decreases the need of maintenance of CPQ during the product lifecycle.
Localized needs
The needs of the customers differ quite a bit between markets, due environmental, regulatory or cultural reasons.
Local market offices has a big influence on all the three letters of CPQ (configuration logic, how to price the product and the look-and-feel of the quotes).
This means that the global configuration needs to be flavoured differently for each market - with market unique defaults and optimizations. Local accessories may be needed in addition to be included in the CPQ.
Body builder integration
A truck is nothing without it's body. And body builders are usually local, specialized and (most often) small companies. Ideally, the customer should be able to configure the vehicle and the body in one CPQ - but that requires a tighter co-operation between the two types of manufacturers.
As a bare minimum the CPQ needs to allow for sharing CAD-drawings for the body builder before the truck is actually built. An easy workaround is of course to limit the configurability - and use semi-standardized drawings - but that limits the sales. Note that this does not only apply to mechanical CAD, but also circuit diagrams etc.
Calculations
There are a number of calculations that need to be done as a part of the sales configuration (e.g. turning radius, weight distribution per axle, powertrain optmization). Some of these calculations are simulations.
Let's take the powertrain optimization: the optimal combination of engine, gearbox and axle gears for a specific usage of the vehicle can't really be configured. Essentially you have to use heuristic rules to find the most likely good combinations - and then run an external simulation of the combinations. This means that the CPQ has to be 'open' for including these calculations - during runtime.
Complex Configuration
A truck consists of a large number of configurable options (500+), and each option can consist of many alternatives (20+). This means that the theoretical number of configurations is even larger than the most complex configurations.
Most manufacturers solve this by creating 'sub-models' - a sub-set of the product which they let their sales reps offer. However, one big issue with this approach is that quite often neither the customer or sales rep know exactly which model is the optimal one.
Traditional guided selling just doesn't do the trick - because you might not be able to know the best model until you're halfway through the configuration. The trick here is to let the user configure the whole product family at the same time - and let the configurator help the user find the optimal solution - not necessarily a predefined model.
Summary
There are a lot of unique complexities in CPQ for the truck industry. Some you might recognize from your industry even if you're now working with trucks.
If you need help with CPQ - you know who to contact!
