A Tentative Approach for Integrating Sales with Technical Configuration

Sales and technical configuration occur at two different steps in make-to-order business processes for manufacturing. They follow different objectives and, above all, involve different skills. When it comes to computerizing both sales and engineering forces, what are the best options for application development? Considering the costs of updating rule-based systems in practice, we suggest a methodology to alleviate the overall maintenance problem of corporate configuration knowledge bases.