We are experiencing quite a growing group of customers who has implemented external sales processes using constraint based configurators. The reason for using an external configurator are mainly based on requirements related to Web based sales processes. I would like to suggest to have a data entity or API developed for D365FO, which will enable a Configuration import function together with a sales order import function. This means creating a configuration from imported external set Attribute values per sales line. The values should be imported and validated in the constraint motor exactly as they were typed in, but of cause throwing execution errors in a log. If the validation is succesfull the system goes on by creating BOM, routing an pricing calculation in exactly the same ways as if they we typed in.
Comments
Hi, following up with others here. The main issue from Microsoft's side is that this framework is built on DLLs which means building a API to communicate with this external solution is probably not an easy task to accomplish. One other issue is that the framework requires a order line reference to complete the configuration. This means that the API would then have to get called against or generate the order line in the same operation, which is not always possible if the order is created in one transaction scope. Based on this a "general" API to solve the configuration seems like a hard task to complete.In my current project we've built an integration solution that runs during sales order creation and accepts configuration attribute values from an external source and maps it to several product configuration models through XML parsing. The code handles configuration on several models even though only one is associated to the sales order line. This however requires the reference being set to the sales order line for all configurated items even though they are configured attached from the main component (not utilizing the sub-component relation). It's not a pretty solution but is works. Why this is important to keep pushing is for Microsoft to actually put some effort in improving the solution and hopefully making it easier to use in code rather than doing XML parsing to solve the case. This is broadly used by customers and many rely on this framework. A framework that is this important should be easier to implement and improve.
Category: Product Information Management
I am seeing the growing need for this functionality as well, especially in the context of EDI. If a customer is using the configurator and receiving configured sales order lines, it is not feasible to manually configure sales order lines after they've been created - not to mention it defeats the purpose of EDI.
Category: Product Information Management
I join to comments above. PC functionality in integration scenarios is getting highly demand. More and more customers are interesting to integrate their third-party applications to follow CPQ approach and they want to use Dynamics as back office. In such cases very helpful that Dynamics performs background configuration - creating config based on solver values provided, creates BOM lines, routes operations and a lot of other stuff which can not be done by third party app. But we as partners cannot give them a solution because on Dynamics side we have just a single class which exposes short functionality of PC framework. And even then we have to implement a lot of stuff to expose that functionality via application/inbound rest api on Dynamics side (for example). We definitely need to have at least full support of configuration process in background. I don't even talk about out of the box integration points.
Category: Product Information Management
There are multiple clients I've worked with that would greatly benefit from this functionality and may end up having to look at other options in order to support their growing needs to expose the configurator options to online sales.
Category: Product Information Management
Hi, is there any news on the topic? We need the possibility to use a product configurator in CE and D365 Supply Chain.
Best regards
Category: Product Information Management
Beatriz Nebot Gracia (administrator) on 9/16/2019 9:54:58 AM
Thank you for your feedback.
Currently this is not in our roadmap; however, we are tracking it and we may consider it in the future.
Sincerely,
Beatriz Nebot Gracia
Microsoft.