Dayton Progress delivers powerful punch with interactive configurator

The business challenge: processing thousands of orders a day, each individually configured in three dimensions at tolerances to the fourth decimal point. Oh, and did we mention: the customer would like it tomorrow.

That's the business of Dayton Progress Corp., a Dayton, Ohio-based leader in the production of punches and other stamping tools for the tool and die industry.

"The permutations and combinations of what can be ordered are virtually endless," says Randy Wissinger, VP of finance. More specifically, a Dayton Progress punch is identified using unique "call-out" numbers that extend to as many 30 alphanumeric characters. The company maintains part catalogs that serve as the starting point for a "like/but different" configuration process. The resulting alphanumeric call-out specifies the unique order and also generates a production routing.

In trying to automate this complex process, the problem has been, "The product knowledge experts had to relate requirements for a new order to a programmer who didn't know the product," Wissinger says. As the business has grown and become more complex, "the number of errors was increasing."

The technical challenge looking to the future: how to reduce the heavy cost of maintaining an antiquated homegrown product configurator with 30 years worth of data input, while streamlining and speeding order-to-shipment performance.

"We found that the standard commercial configurator isn't designed for custom products. It's more assembly-oriented," says Wissinger. "We needed a system that could deal with angles and tolerances in three dimensions out to four decimal points."

According to Dayton Progress, a key requirement of any new solution is to accommodate the editing of the call-out numbers. "This was the real knockout for the majority of product configurators we looked at," says Wissinger. "They couldn't handle the editing."

One system, however, clearly could.

Dayton Progress opted for Cincom Systems' Interactive Selling and Product Configuration solution for three key reasons:

• It eliminates the need for specialized IT programming services by allowing product specialists to interact directly with Cincom's Knowledge Builder, a graphical, rapid application development environment based on expert system technology. Product specialists then build the orders themselves.
• The demanding algebraic computations involving advanced geometry and trigonometry for configuring orders were built into the system.
• The data transfer would take months—not years—and be performed by the product specialists.

Populating the new configurator with existing product data took the four product specialists 18 months. "What they have been able to accomplish with Knowledge Builder is nothing short of amazing," Wissinger says. "Without it, it would have taken 10 programmers five years."

The Cincom system allows the product specialist to call up the appropriate punch blank and define specifications to the customer's requirements. If the blank is not in stock, the system searches and retrieves the item with the next-closest fit. Once the order is configured, the system generates the best plant routing to ensure timely shipment.

And adding new products has proven to be a snap. "In the middle of the implementation, we added a new product that, with the old system, would have taken eight weeks to add," Wissinger says. "Instead, it took only three days."

The system will be rolled out to all six Dayton Progress plants worldwide over the next few years. The ultimate goal: to have customers access the system via the Internet and enter orders directly.