Variant management

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The variant management (or variant management ) is a holistic approach to master the variety of variants of a product over the entire product life cycle ; this also includes preventing, reducing or optimizing the variety of products, e.g. B. by creating product families and considering the total costs with regard to product development , procurement , production , market strategy and customer satisfaction .

Variant management in sales

The increasing globalization and segmentation of the sales markets as well as the constant differentiation of customer requirements require manufacturers to offer an ever greater variety of products at low cost. In the automotive industry it is now common that customers can configure their own product. Due to the variety of models and equipment offered, the correct description of the desired vehicle variant can sometimes be very difficult for the customer, as there are numerous interdependencies between the many different equipment features of a vehicle. For the description of the variants, the vehicle manufacturers offer product configurators that support the customer in selecting the permitted equipment. Certain body-motor-gearbox combinations are 'prohibited' or certain equipment combinations must be selected, e.g. B. a more powerful battery when choosing an air conditioner. A logical product definition in the form of an ideal Boolean algebra is helpful for mastering the variety of variants and for creating a consistent product configuration. This ensures a consistent product definition and facilitates the description of restrictions between the model and equipment variants.

Variant management in production

The challenge in production is to ensure efficient production despite the increasing number of variants. The aim of the manufacturer is to produce as many different end products as possible with as few different individual parts and assemblies as possible, which can be built together using simple manufacturing processes; this requires standardized interfaces (see the principle of Lego bricks). A large number of similar products, which differ only in a few details, are created from a few combinable 'building blocks'. In order to master the diversity and complexity of the variants as a whole, it is advisable to describe the variants on different mapping levels, each of which only reproduces a certain section or scope of the variants.

  1. Product level: describes the sales-relevant characteristics of the product variants
  2. Assembly level: Describes the variants of modules and units resulting from assembly
  3. Structure level: describes the variants of the basic technical assemblies
  4. Material level: describes the variants of the individual parts, raw parts and semi-finished products

Production control is based on the respective levels; While flow processes play a major role in the assembly and structural level, discontinuous processes and different manufacturing methods are often the focus of parts production .

Reasons for the variety

Possible reasons for the variety of variants required by the market are, for example:

  • Greatly different applications for the individual variants.
  • Different legal requirements for different countries or markets.
  • The trend towards individual ownership to stand out from the crowd.
  • Increasing design orientation of the products.
  • Individually different requirements of the users of the same product.
  • Technical advancement with limited upward or downward compatibility.

Examples of variant management

In the IT sector, it is often possible these days to specify in detail how the goods should look when placing an order. For example, in the extreme case of a computer that is very modular nowadays, the price range between the basic variant and the most expensive possible one can be several orders of magnitude. The customer receives a tailor-made product without the manufacturer incurring additional work. A tool for variant management is, for example, a product configurator .

Variant management and marketing

An important aspect of variant management is that the offered variants are even noticed by the customer. For example, the customer often cannot differentiate between very similar variants. In the field of marketing , preliminary research is carried out here (among other things to determine the expected cannibalization among the variants) and, in the later course of product development, it is determined how the different variants can be presented to the customer.

Variant management in software development

Variant management deals with different forms or variants of a software and helps with their structuring, administration and generation. This means that variant management enables entire product lines to be managed more easily and individual variants to be easily compiled and reconfigured from the properties of the product line. The individual product variants can then optimally be generated automatically from a cross-product line base of source texts and resources. In many larger software projects, there are variants for different target groups. A classic breakdown is the division into personal , professional and enterprise variants.

So far there are few tools on the market that specifically specialize in variant management. Overall, variant management is still a relatively new aspect of software development. For this reason, the topic of variant management is often confused with version management , so that a distinction between the terms only becomes apparent from a certain complexity of a software project.

literature

  • B. Avak: Variant Management of Modular Product Families in the Market Phase . VDI-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2006, ISBN 3-18-318016-2 .
  • W. Herlyn: PPS in automobile construction - production program planning and control of vehicles and assemblies . Hanser Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-446-41370-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Herlyn: PPS in the automotive industry. 2012, p. 76 ff.