TactonWorks: Useful KBE/configurator/design automator

On Saturday, before SolidWorks World started, I met with Matt Cummins, Brian Titus and Johan Ernfors of Tacton to get the low-down on their product TactonWorks. Tacton is a competitor of DriveWorks, but has some distinct advantages. Tacton is based in Sweeden, and originated from a stand-alone product configurator application. TactonWorks, the product that runs inside of SolidWorks is based on this simultaneous solver, and stores its data in XML files. Tacton is unique in this part of the market, because most of the current players came at KBE from the CAD side of things, with a CAD understanding of how to change models. Tacton comes to the table with stand-alone configuration management experience, and brings a different perspective on how to drive changes.

KBE (knowledge based engineering), ETO (engineer to order), product configuration, design automation, whatever you call it, this is an important tool if your business has to continually reengineer assemblies that can be defined by rules. Especially in the current economic climate, working more efficiently can be an important factor in which jobs survive, and which do not. I’m fond of saying that “KBE is the bus to be on for the engineer. If you are not on this bus, you may find yourself under it”. Any tool meant to increase efficiency has the potential to replace workers, so you want to be the one driving this bus. Matt and the guys characterized this somewhat differently. Rather than replacing engineers, they look at it such that engineers will be freed up to do other more interesting tasks.

When I worked for a reseller, I was sent to be trained on Rule Stream, which at that time was considered the high end of KBE applications. DriveWorks was relatively new at that time, and Rule Stream got away with a haughty PTC-esque sneer-down-the-nose at anything else. They would not spend time with a prospect unless the deal had the potential to hit the $250,000 mark. In the training, Rule Stream told you with a straight face that you do not need to be a programmer to use their software, and then they would proceed to show you how to program with it. You also needed to be a database administrator to get the most out of Rule Stream. Engineers are more likely to have programming skills than database admin skills.

Rule Stream was adamant about terminology. They were not selling a mere “product configurator”. That term was reserved as a derogatory reference meaning “anyone else”. At that time, they referred to their product as a KBE development kit.

I haven’t heard much about Rule Stream in the intervening years, while the “lower end” systems have flourished. They seem to have changed their song to SBE (standards based engineering). It cracks me up when companies that take themselves too seriously turn to buzzword engineering to mask a lack of value.

If you are familiar with Rule Stream, I don’t remember any of the training in Rule Stream that covered things that TactonWorks cannot handle. TactonWorks costs a fraction of what Rule Stream cost, and the consultation implementation time requirement is far less for Tacton.

Tacton doesn’t seem to be very interested in what you call their application. On their website’s home page, they refer to their own product as a “Sales and product configurator”. One of their demos calls it “interactive design automation”. Don’t let the words fool you. It is as full powered as anything else out there.

TactonWorks is a certified gold partner with Solidworks, meaning that it is integrated right into the SolidWorks window, and committed to upgrades matching SolidWorks release schedule.

Tacton has a module that can be used across the web by sales people and even customers. So you could have customers configure the product they want to buy online, and then the software produces detail drawings for production immediately. It can spit out sales quotations based on the inputs.

Configuring the rules in TactonWorks Studio is reasonably intuitive. Assign Tacton variables to dimensions or other parameters inside SolidWorks, and make logical expressions to make decisions. Tacton solves all constraints simultaneously, so you don’t have the problems associated with circular logic. You can write expressions that eliminate some options without writing IF loops. Options are colored either orange or green, green for options that work without other changes, and orange for solutions that require additional changes.

Part of the argument for using a product like Tacton is the sheer number of possibilities. If you have 4 options on a product and within each option there are 4 choices, there are 65,536 possible combinations. This kind of flexibility is not practical using design tables in Solidworks, but is completely practical with TactonWorks. Some everyday scenarios for configurable products can run into the millions of possible combinations.

When configuring a product, building the interface is as easy as dragging and dropping buttons, boxes and other elements. Connecting the interface to the model is almost as easy as the point-and-click functionality we use for design tables in SolidWorks and Excel.

There is plenty of functionality that I’m leaving out here. One of the things I was most impressed with was the types of logic you can build into the expressions. Your expression doesn’t have to have an explicit answer, so if you want to limit a value to a particular range, that’s a possibility.

Just to link the KBE topic back to SolidWorks techniques, the Horizontal Modeling concept is one that you need to employ if you are building a model to be configured by a tool such as TactonWorks. You need to be able to make the model as flexible as possible while driving it from the outside. Modeling for KBE is actually very different from modeling for maximum parametric control. But that’s a topic for another post.

In case you missed it, Matt Cummins submitted a great video showing how TactonWorks could be used to tackle a problem like th Puffy Cube challenge that was so popular last month. Go back and check it out.