BMW: Delivering Customer Focused Products on a Global Scale
Hear how BMW delivers increasingly complex, personalized vehicles faster than ever with greater variety and capabilities.
Watch the On-demand WebcastEmbracing product diversity across the product lifecycle
Product diversity has been the enemy of operational efficiency, complicating processes, introducing the potential for errors, and adding development and quality-related costs. However, in today’s highly competitive global marketplace, the ability to meet varied customer preferences or unique requirements of emerging markets is key to revenue growth.
PLM provides broad coverage for product variant management, enabling manufacturers to engineer for choice. The geometry, the embedded software, the different bills of information, and all the configurable logic is executed using a single source of data with department-level execution.
Grow market share with product variant management to meet customer needs
Traditional approaches to manufacturing make the production of variants and configurations more complex. Product diversity breeds increased inventories, reduced economies of scale, service inefficiencies, manufacturing errors, and increased risk of non-compliance.
With PTC’s product variant management solution, time to market is dramatically reduced as developers reuse previous designs. Manufacturing performance becomes seamless with configuration-specific process plans and work instructions. First-time fix rates increase with engineering, providing product-specific information to technicians. Taken together, PTC’s product variant management capabilities enable manufacturers to more efficiently pursue new market opportunities while lowering overall lifecycle costs.
Managing controls, platform modules, and configurations
Platform strategies begin once a decision is made to define products in a new or different way. They are built from a base product platform containing the key features and functionality common to all planned variants.
With product variant management from PTC, you can strategically design, create, manage, and validate product variants. Platform options, choices, logic, and configuration rules are directly linked to the bill of material (BOM), 3D visualization, and CAD data to deliver a robust modular solution. Platform information can be fully lifecycle-managed, making it easily available to validate the product and share it with other enterprise tools such as ERP and CPQ.
Key product features
Consistent product variant management for meeting the diverse requirements of market, geographical, and customer-specific demands.
-
Option pool/option set: Provide enterprise management and visibility to options and logic, removing the need for spreadsheets
-
Advanced logic: Describe more complex variable logic for configure-to-order needs with range-based variables, case tables, and more
-
Product family matrix: Quickly see how configurations are planned and make updates as needed
-
Independent assigned expressions: Update customer offerings without requiring engineering to make logic-only updates to BOMs
-
Rules logic: Create logic containing a variety of rules that define how products can be configured. Create and tie together engineering and marketing logic
-
Change management: Synchronize changes from design through to plant-specific production information managed in ERP systems with local and global rule effectivity management
-
Configure variant BOM: Create configurations for order specific variants or use these to describe stock offerings based off a common platform
Customer stories
See examples of how your peers are using PLM for product variant management.
Learn more about product variant management with Windchill
Windchill is a PLM solution designed to support enterprises in ensuring operational efficiency. This comprehensive solution has been deployed across the world, helping more than 1.5 million users access their organization's digital thread. See how Windchill transforms the way global teams manage product variability at scale to customize multiple product lines.