From: AAAI Technical Report FS-96-03. Compilation copyright © 1996, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Charlie
Position
Carson
Statement
Cincom Systems UK Ltd.
99 King Street
Maidenhead
Berkshire SL6 1DP
England
Tel +44 1628 542337
Fax +44 1628 542310
Email ccarson@cincom.com
For the past 11 years , I have worked for the Business Control Systems (BCS) Division of Cincom
Systems UKin the areas of consultancy and product development of business management software.
Cincom’s core products include CONTROL:Manufacturing,an Enterprise Resource Planning package,
and CONTROL:Acquire,a suite of products addressing Sales Cycle Management& Sales Force Alitomation.
In the last 5 years, I have workedvery closely with Dr. Akeel Attar of Attar Software Ltd. specialising
in the utilisation of Artificial Intelligence tools in 20 the processes of selling, manufacturingand delivering
configured products. A key effort in Cincomand Attars collaboration is to ensure that any development
produces an AI configuration tool which is easy to use in terms of rule capture, constraint definition
and integration into the sales and order fulfillment business cycle.The culmination of Cincom/Attar’s
development is the release of SalesConfigurator, a key component of Cincom’s CONTROL:Acquire
suite
of products
I presented a paper at a Configuration Managementconference in London in May1995 and have had
articles
on Knowledge Based Product Configuration published in Engineering Datamation and PCAI
magazines.
Personal experience of applying configuration systems in large organizations has led me to conclude
that configuration knowledge must be easily defined, maintained and distributed otherwise implementation will fail regardless of the sophistication of the technology used. Myinterest in the workshop is
to exchange ideas with other attendees and further explore the practical application of AI configuration
techniques within industry.
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