Consumer markets demand more and more the individualization of products, which is in turn a very demanding task for manufacturing companies to realize this individual, customized customer requests. The economical mastery of the required product complexity and variety behind customized manufacturing, beginning with the order entry at sales, as well as in the design and manufacturing departments, are of crucial significance. Providers on this market have to be able to individually respond to customer requests and present technically cleared offers at the beginning, manufacture the customized products optimized, both in cost and quality and deliver the ordered products on time. To realize an effective and efficient, individualized mass production as a mass customization, it is necessary to offer the customer an individual solution, which is based on the providers side largely on standardized and automated basic models and manufacturing processes.

The product configurator PASCAM con@3D is an application to enable your retail customers or sales staff, which are not qualified to customize and modify SolidWorks^® models, to assemble and configure even complex, predefined SolidWorks^® files from your catalogue of products, in a correct and efficient way. Modification of the selected SolidWorks^® models is only permitted under a restrictive set of rules, defined by your design department.

The PASCAM con@3D product family is being developed to complement the 3D CAD system SolidWorks^®, to be used either for a remote controlled, visual order entry or an integrated online interior planning solution. Offering new and undreamt-of possibilities for the woodworking sector, sharing SolidWorks^® model data with end customers, retailers and suppliers over the Internet, to process orders with full model data consistency right up to the CNC machines.

The added value of PASCAM con@3D lies in improving the competitiveness by:

•  drastically reducing the time required to create customized offers,

•  faster response to customer requests,

•  launching only complete and professional offers, regardless of the user at order entry (retail customers or sales staff),

•  drastically reducing the time required for custom design and engineering,

•  substantially faster delivery of the complete product documentation (3D models, drawings, BOMs, CNC data),

•  reducing the costs of nonconformity and design errors when manually redesigning,

•  3D visualization of the individual product and

•  efficiently the reusing of parts and components.

The product configurator PASCAM con@3D is still under development. A lower level solution called PASCAM con@3D Var is already available for in-house product configuration engineering. Development goals for the consumer market are defined, but the product itself is still at the beginnings. Nevertheless we would like to show you, where the coming developments will lead us and what kind of efforts we want to undertake to achieve them.