Automated Product Configurators ETO / iLogic

[Kris_Inv2013]

Hi All,

I would be keen to have a conversation with anybody interested in or has experience with Product Configurators i.e. ETO / iLogic and automated design processes.

I have developed an Excel Spreadsheet & iLogic driven assembly which literally is an automated Product Configurator. 

The assembly consist of 150 components approximately, with a lot of logic and mechanical engineering consideration built into most components. The spreadsheet carries the most engineering intelligence.

iLogic can print BOM, update drawings, save light weight models(.dwf), and pdf copy of drawings. Of course there is a lot more potential in iLogic.

All this for quotation purposes to customers..

From the BOM output of this assy we can generate cost with our newly developed Costing Program(interacts with ERP).

We also have a Front End Application Developed in house embodying the Sales/ApplicationEngineering/Enquiry System functions. This front end application outputs the parameter values to my Excel spreadsheet and runs the CAD model to generate the new customized iteration.

What do you think would be the advantage of ETO over what I already have?

Any comment is much appreciated.

Regards,

Kris

[FarrenYoung]

I'm sure someone from autodesk will drop by with better/more reasons ETO is better, but I believe the logic would be easier to maintain/organize/upgrade/add to using ETO.

I believe ETO would offer a better user interface than excel.  It certainly has more functionality than excel (tooltips, warning/error messages or icons, background colors, inputs appearing and disappearing based on the values of other inputs, a tree structure to allow easy navigation of inputs, etc.)

Here is an example of an interface developed with ETO (this product appears similar to yours)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdQhjABdb-E

[sanjay.ramaswamy]

Kris,

There are 3 approaches to automating tasks in Inventor: Inventor API, iLogic and ETO. While each of these approaches have their place, you need to select the approach that most suits the nature of the automation. iLogic is best suited for increasing developer productivity and avoid repetitive tasks. ETO is best suited for creating business process automation applications. Technically, you can use iLogic (or even Inventor API) to automate the entire business process, but these approaches do not lend themselves to maintainability, scalability and flexibility of deployment.

In addition to Farren's comment, I would add 3 major advantages of ETO over iLogic, for business process automation:

1. Automatic file management (ETO takes care of files to use/reuse/copy, etc.). No additional code to write or maintain.
2. Integration into Vault or other PDM systems.
3. Web/mobile deployment of the application for use by sales teams and your customers.

I've also attached some slides that compare ETO and iLogic.

Sanjay-

Product Manager, ETO and iLogic

[Kris_Inv2013]

Hi Farren, hi Sanjay,

This is exactly the dilema. The thing is, that our company is currently use 2D tools and drawing management system. It is all manual, part no allocation, drawings, BOMs, etc. We don’t use Vault neither.
Now we are looking at moving on to 3D and using Vault to manage our files and data. Hence it is an ideal opportunity to invest into ETO as well if I can justify it….
My main concern is the file management, I am suspecting that ETO could deal with this better than what I can accomplish with iLogic.

Also Level of Details are a big big pain in Inventor. Although I keep everything in ‘Custom LOD’ (my top level assy and the first level of sub assys), whenever a suppression is implemented it confuses all my rules (saveAs, print BOM, etc.)
Also it jumps back to Master LOD every now and then for no reason… inspite that all my Custom LODs are linked together.

So to recap it all, I am thinking that ETO could overcome this and maybe use methods other than suppression – which seems inevitable occasionally due to the complexity of the product.

Worth to note that I have redesign my whole assy to use logic and features other than suppression, but it is needed sometimes to reduce the number on Master Assemblies…

Thanks for the comments.