One configurator is a project. A platform only starts with the second one, because that is the first moment you find out which parts of the first were really about the product and which were about the job of turning a product into a production pack. AxisMod now has two modules, ceiling baffles and shop front fascias, and building the second one answered that question in a way that matters to anyone who has their own product in mind.
Two products that share nothing on the surface
A baffle ceiling is a field of identical fins hung under a soffit, laid out around luminaires, sprinklers and diffusers. A fascia is a branded front: panels, built-up letters, a wordmark scaled to the frontage, LED counted per letter, repeated across a chain of sites. Different materials, different fixings, different drawings, different client conversation. If you compared the two by their 3D previews you would say they are two separate pieces of software.
They are not, and that is the useful part.
What turned out to be common
Before the fascia module was started, I went through the baffle configurator and pulled out everything that was not specifically about baffles. This is what came out:
- The working environment. The option panel, the cards and chips a choice is made with, the tool rail next to the 3D view. A client who has used one module already knows how to use the next.
- Dimensions. Entering a size in millimetres the same way in every module.
- The bill of materials. One structure for every line: item, quantity, unit price, total. Baffle profiles and fascia trays go into the same kind of table.
- Cutting to stock. Allocating pieces to the lengths material is actually bought in, with waste and utilisation shown before ordering. A baffle profile and a fascia part have nothing in common, but fitting them into stock bars is the same problem.
- Production documents. One way of laying out, titling and downloading a document, so a layout plan from one module and a fascia pack from the other look like they come from the same workshop.
- The 3D scene around the product. Loading, materials, the moment the preview is ready to be shown.
What stayed behind is the part that is really the product: the rules. How a baffle run breaks around an opening. How a fascia splits into panels without cutting a letter. How LED is counted, where the fixings go, which documents that particular product needs.
Why it was harder than moving files around
The trap in this kind of work is that the first module is already public as a demo. Pulling its foundations out from underneath it must not change a single thing it does, and "it looks fine to me" is not a test.
So the rule was simple: the baffle module had to come out of the rebuild pixel for pixel the same as it went in. I captured every screen of it before the change, captured the same screens after, and compared them. All eight were identical. Only then did the fascia module get built on top of the shared layer, and it has been running on it since.
It is unglamorous work and nobody sees it on a screenshot. It is also what lets the second module spend its effort on fascia rules instead of on rebuilding tables and documents.
What this means for a third product
If you make something that is quoted, drawn and cut the same way every time with different dimensions, such as a light box, a totem, a partition system or a counter, the question is not whether a configurator can be built for it. The question is how much of it is genuinely yours, and the answer is: the rules and the documents, not the plumbing.
In practice that means a new module starts from what you already know:
- Your inputs: what a salesperson or a client actually measures and chooses.
- Your rules: brand rules, fabrication limits, how you split, join and fix things.
- Your catalogue: profiles, sheets, stock lengths, prices.
- Your outputs: the drawings, schedules and cut files your shop floor already works from.
Everything else, from the option panel to the bill of materials and the cut list, is already there and already tested on two products that could hardly be more different.
Both modules can be clicked through on the AxisMod page. Keep in mind they are demonstrators: the fascia module runs on a fictional chain and both use demo catalogues with indicative prices. If you have a product that you currently redraw for every order, that is exactly the kind of thing the next module is for, and the conversation starts with how you quote it today.
This is not theory for me: I have already built and rolled out a similar production module at the company I work for, so I know what it takes to move a product from being redrawn by hand to being generated.
