Configuration-Driven Design to Manufacturing: Turning Engineering Knowledge into Reusable Digital

Across industrialized construction and product-based building systems, engineering  and manufacturing knowledge is often fragmented across spreadsheets, drawings,      databases, software platforms and individual specialists. Even when  companies use BIM, ERP and fabrication tools, the logic connecting project requirements  to product     configuration and manufacturing frequently remains manual and  person-dependent.

At Muraflex, this fragmentation was reflected in a workflow that moved  sequentially through drafting, hardware, glass, aluminum and pre-production, requiring  six different     specialists. Information had to be repeatedly interpreted between  departments and was manually re-entered at least three times.

This created multiple handoffs, dependency on specialist availability,  inconsistent information between systems and difficulty scaling the process as project  volume     increased.

The challenge was to replace this fragmented, specialist-dependent workflow  with a structured digital process capable of capturing engineering, product and  manufacturing     knowledge once and reusing it consistently from project requirements through configuration, BIM and fabrication.

The  solution resolves this challenge by replacing fragmented, person-dependent  decision making with a configuration-driven digital workflow in which  engineering,     product and manufacturing knowledge is captured once and reused throughout  the design-to-manufacturing process.

At Muraflex, this approach has been implemented through a Revit-based  configurator supported by structured product data, reusable decision rules and explicit  compatibility mappings. The system determines valid product selections, dimensions, materials, hardware and fabrication conditions, then reuses the same configured  information to generate coordinated BIM models, elevations, standardized details,  quantities, hardware BOMs, glass fabrication data, aluminum cutting/CNC information and  pre-production     outputs.

AI-assisted field measurement processing extends the workflow by  interpreting site information and applying engineering rules to recalculate dimensions, validate tolerances and update the parametric model.

A web-based estimator prototype extends the same logic upstream, using  early project  information to support configuration and estimation and to generate  structured BIM     outputs, including RVT and IFC.

The result is a continuous digital thread from project requirements to fabrication, reducing repeated interpretation, duplicate data entry and sequential  departmental     handoffs while making specialist knowledge reusable across projects.