TY - GEN
T1 - The anatomy of a sales configurator
T2 - 25th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2013
AU - Abbasi, Ebrahim Khalil
AU - Hubaux, Arnaud
AU - Acher, Mathieu
AU - Boucher, Quentin
AU - Heymans, Patrick
PY - 2013/7/12
Y1 - 2013/7/12
N2 - Nowadays, mass customization has been embraced by a large portion of the industry. As a result, the web abounds with sales configurators that help customers tailor all kinds of goods and services to their specific needs. In many cases, configurators have become the single entry point for placing customer orders. As such, they are strategic components of companies' information systems and must meet stringent reliability, usability and evolvability requirements. However, the state of the art lacks guidelines and tools for efficiently engineering web sales configurators. To tackle this problem, empirical data on current practice is required. The first part of this paper reports on a systematic study of 111 web sales configurators along three essential dimensions: rendering of configuration options, constraint handling, and configuration process support. Based on this, the second part highlights good and bad practices in engineering web sales configurator. The reported quantitative and qualitative results open avenues for the elaboration of methodologies to (re-)engineer web sales configurators.
AB - Nowadays, mass customization has been embraced by a large portion of the industry. As a result, the web abounds with sales configurators that help customers tailor all kinds of goods and services to their specific needs. In many cases, configurators have become the single entry point for placing customer orders. As such, they are strategic components of companies' information systems and must meet stringent reliability, usability and evolvability requirements. However, the state of the art lacks guidelines and tools for efficiently engineering web sales configurators. To tackle this problem, empirical data on current practice is required. The first part of this paper reports on a systematic study of 111 web sales configurators along three essential dimensions: rendering of configuration options, constraint handling, and configuration process support. Based on this, the second part highlights good and bad practices in engineering web sales configurator. The reported quantitative and qualitative results open avenues for the elaboration of methodologies to (re-)engineer web sales configurators.
KW - Configuration
KW - Empirical Study
KW - Reverse Engineering
KW - Survey
KW - Variability
KW - Web
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84879876300&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-38709-8_11
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-38709-8_11
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84879876300
SN - 9783642387081
VL - 7908 LNCS
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 162
EP - 177
BT - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Y2 - 17 June 2013 through 21 June 2013
ER -