Product Variant Management
Manage complex variants and configurations at scale.
What is variant management? Why is it important?
Product variants are modifications of a master product, such as differing feature sets, materials, colors, or performance levels. Product variant management is the process of managing variants throughout the product lifecycle. Mature product variant management is essential to modern product companies. It enables organizations to efficiently execute product platform strategies, respond quickly to "oneoff" requests, reduce engineering costs, and maximize revenues by providing a more diverse product portfolio that better meets customer needs.
Embracing product diversity across the product lifecycle
In today's highly competitive global marketplace, the ability to meet diverse customer preferences quickly and efficiently is key to revenue growth. Product variability offers wide-ranging benefits—and added complexity. Without the right tool support, variants can complicate operational efficiency and processes, invite potential errors, and increase quality costs. Advanced PLM and ALM capabilities provide broad coverage for product variant management, enabling manufacturers to engineer by choice. Product geometry, embedded software, bills of information, and configurable logic can all be executed with a single source of data.
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
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
Multiple development streams: Manage multiple parallel development branches. Gain full control over merged changes to maintain high product quality
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.
