Taking Control of Product Configuration
Industry Trends in Mass Customization
In today's market, mass customization is what everyone’s talking about. Customers are no longer satisfied with what comes standard. On the contrary: they expect customized products that reflect their own wishes and meet their specific needs. Several 2018 start-ups in the U.S. have based their business models on the following ideology: meet the personal tastes of the consumer and create an experience that connects both sales and manufacturing for the customer. While beneficial for attracting customers and growing the business, the trend in product customization has at the same time created an ever-increasing product data management challenge for manufacturers.
Why Product Configuration Management?
The importance of product flexibility in the sales, design and manufacturing processes is growing dramatically due to an increasingly consumer-driven market. A digital product configurator tool is a strategic choice for Industry 4.0 leaders to achieve this. A product configurator enables users by intuitively, simply and quickly displaying the right product from the large number of possible variants according to the user’s individual requirements. This tool also aids users, including customers, in developing approved product configurations accurately and with minimum effort, ultimately reducing engineering efforts and improving the sales process.
Industry 4.0 Tools for Product Configuration
How does Industries eXcellence approach helping manufacturing customers approach managing product complexity in their organizations? Our team leverages the Teamcenter offering from Siemens PLM Software. With product configuration inside PLM, you can meet the demand for more advanced and varied product offerings, without driving up costs. By leveraging the product configuration backbone in Teamcenter, organizations can provide a common definition of variability across the lifecycle.
You use the Product Configurator to define variant data for your company, and then associate it with product items and product models. Using the Product Configurator allows you to create comprehensive variant data for various Teamcenter applications in a single location. These definitions are used by other applications, for example, 4G Designer, in which you apply the defined variability to the CAD designs. You can also create items to represent variant option libraries and products in other applications (typically, in My Teamcenter) and send them to the Product Configurator.
Benefits of Product Configuration Management:
- Ensure system variability and requirements compliance accountability
- Ensure program decisions and targets are tracked and accounted for through product development process
- Provide product planning input to engineering and design
- Design, clearance for a range of configurations, at once
- Identify if any parts are missing or incomplete for any variant
- Directly consume and react to marketing inputs
- Automate inclusion of only relevant product documentation
- Directly leverage engineering variability and configurations to ensure process plan consistency without duplication
- Configure a product with the features customers want
- Visualize customer orders as they make decisions
- Ensure customers do not see choices that are not relevant to their orders
- Consistently managing all variability in one central repository
- Managing one or many corporate dictionaries of all features offered across all product lines
- For each product line or product model, specifying exactly the subset of features that are relevant and allowed
- Enabling intuitive and efficient grid-based and table-based user interaction
- Enabling management of configurator data separate from product data
- Allowing marketing users, engineers, and even dealers and sales engineers to define, react to, and leverage variability through the product definition process
Engineering’s Advantage
Our team of Industries eXcellence experts can help you take control of your product configurations – whether you deliver products with a defined set of supported variants, more complex products with an exponential number of possible variations and combinations, or engineered-to-order products that require new variants of parts and designs with every order.
