Product Configuration Management

Configuring-to-Order

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. As a result, the importance of product flexibility in the sales, design and manufacturing processes is growing dramatically due to an increasingly consumer-driven market. In order to provide, manage and manufacture different product variations to meet the demands of this consumer market, manufacturers must have a solid and efficient product configuration management process in place. Digital tools for managing product configuration data and making it easily available to the shop floor are increasingly becoming a strategic choice for Industry 4.0 leaders in order to achieve this.

Product Configuration Management has often been thought of as a design problem, but the reality is that decisions are made about what product variants to offer long before a designer begins his work. Product configuration must also be closely tied to manufacturing, to make sure that what is produced in the plant is the correct variant of the product ordered. The implications of those decisions impact people across the product lifecycle. Our team of experts help customers leverage advanced digital tools to adopt efficient product configuration management processes that will help them handle more options with less effort.

A digital product configurator, like the one offered within the Siemens Teamcenter offering, enables users to manage even the most complex set of product configurations by intuitively, simply and quickly displaying the right product from the large number of possible variants according to the user’s individual requirements. This type of 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. The ability to manage product variation separate from the product is also critical, enabling the manufacturing business to focus on product features ahead of product design and structure.

Functionalities of Product Configuration Management

Flexible tool that promotes re-usability for areas that require constant setup
Provides access to frequently selected data by using configuration templates
Provides a visual overview of the component structure.
Components and attributes can be easily arranged into logical groups by using attribute groups
Identify if any parts are missing or incomplete for any variant
Automate inclusion of only relevant product documentation or process information to configuration variants
Create and manage complex product configurations and associated process definitions
Configure a product with the features wanted by the customer
Visualize customer orders as they make decisions
Integration with PLM system to ensure engineering, planning and manufacturing are aligned
Integration with sales portals to enable direct link between customer and manufacturing

Benefits of Product Configuration Management

Ensure system variability and requirements compliance accountability
Ensure consistency and accuracy by managing all variability in one central repository
Improve lead time and customer satisfaction
Drive reusability of data
Facilitate communication and collaboration across the enterprise (design, planning, manufacturing and sales)
Improve flexibility of manufacturing
Respond better to the specialized needs of the customer
Reduce high costs tied to overproduction
Drive lean and paperless processes

Engineering’s Expertise

Product Configuration Management software enables companies to efficiently sell and process orders for configurable, multi-option and customizable products and services. When integrated with the data management environment across the lifecycle of a product, such tools also facilitate rapid workflow management from sales to engineering to production, reducing the time-to-market and improving efficiency from start to finish. In line with our approach to creating a single and central repository for the management of all product data, our team typically implements product configuration tools integrated within the existing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment of our customers.