Enabling Tools and Technologies
Parts Management System
Timely and accurate information about the parts and components for designing, building and servicing products is a critical success factor in a complex manufacturing environment.
With 70% or more of a product's costs committed during design, lack of relevant part information can significantly affect the cost of components and assemblies.
The Trigent Parts Management Software Solution helps manufacturers reduce costs associated with parts introduction, duplication, and retirement. Trigent's solution gives engineering organizations the ability to:
- Create and maintain standard parts descriptions and vendor lists
- Organize information in the way most appropriate for each engineer's unique needs, with support for multiple classifications of parts and suppliers
- Facilitate company-specific business processes for the approval of the introduction of new parts or suppliers
- Access timely information about parts and components, integrating information from CAD, PDM, ERP and SCM systems
- Eliminate duplicate part introductions, promote parts reuse, and reduce duplicate parts already in production
- Support rationalization of suppliers by cross-reference of suppliers-to-parts and identification of overlaps and parameterization of suppliers based on key performance factors
Product Configurator
Trigent offers a custom software solution to enable build-to-order manufacturers to profitably and efficiently configure complex products to meet the unique requirements of each customer.
Trigent's Product Configuration Management Solution, TriCon, provides a central repository of configuration knowledge that product experts directly create and maintain. This single source of knowledge is used throughout the enterprise to generate and build made-to-order product configurations.
TriCon configures the product that most closely fits each customer's requirements. Using business rules and product information, TriCon validates custom orders, selects parts and assemblies, determines order completeness, and generates detailed bills of material.
TriCon functions as a central part of a business's collaborative manufacturing environment, providing accurate information across functional areas such as marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and customer service, and integrating with other enterprise systems such as ERP and PLM applications.
Rules Based Systems
Business rules are the practices, processes and procedures that define how a company conducts a particular business function. Rules-based systems employ these rules to automate complex processes, and facilitate the management of change across the entire enterprise.
Rules-based technology is used today in systems ranging from product configuration for manufacturers to customer service and support solutions for call centers.
Trigent is experienced in developing systems with large rules bases to facilitate enterprise-wide process management. We implement systems that minimize functional dependence between rules, allowing for the creation of systems that encompass thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands, of rules. Since these rules are created directly by experts instead of by "knowledge engineers", they significantly reduce programming dependency.
Our range of capabilities includes:
- Analyzing and discovering requirements for rules-based systems
- Defining processes for rule creation and management
- Architecture design and prototyping
- Developing rule repositories
- Evaluating and selecting rules-based applications for specific client requirements, including commercial off-the-shelf applications and Trigent’s proprietary software
- Optimizing and testing business rules
- Integrating rules-based systems with existing legacy applications
- Automating rules generation (for example, from CAD data or from problem reports)
- Structuring systems for optimal performance
