Since, I recently attended (and even presented at) the CWG conference in Marco Island, I figured this would be a good time to let you know about the group. The CWG, or Configurator WorkGroup, is THE group if you do anything with Variant Configuration. This group focuses on variant configuration, configure to order, engineer to order, and pretty much anything that has to do with being able to dynamically configure a product based on a set of rules.
http://configuration-workgroup.com/
If you’re not part of the CWG, I highly encourage you to get registered. It’s free, and without a doubt, it has the most complete forum of VC related questions. If you can’t find an answer here, make a post and it’s likely someone will have an idea that can solve your problem.
About my only complaint with the conference is that it tends to focuses heavily on the IPC (internet pricing and configuration), which is the web based/CRM based version of the variant configurator. That’s not a bad thing, but there are a lot of us that care about the ERP based engine. The conference this time around actually was good, because there was nearly a day of ETO/Specials processing in VC. All of presentations are online from the past 10 years or so.
short story, I encourage you to involved… or check it out if you haven’t been there in a while…
good luck