Customers today are more demanding than ever. They expect to be able to choose from multiple options when making purchases and want products that are personalized to their specific tastes. Manufacturers must strive to increase product diversity and variability without passing along cost increases to its customers. This requires manufacturers to be very agile and respond quickly to meet customer’s demands for more personalized products and continue to deliver them as quickly as possible.
Meeting these challenges has become somewhat of a requirement for manufacturers who want to remain competitive in today’s demanding global markets. An effective variant design and generation process can help companies face this challenge by defining conceptual product definitions that can be reused across a multiple series of products, satisfy market expectations, and provide future optional capabilities.
By defining and managing multiple design variants, manufacturers can create multiple product variants that not only meet specific customer’s needs, but those of different regions and specific niche markets. By adopting an effective way to generate multiple variants of designs, companies can provide their customers with a greater variety of products, improving customer satisfaction without significantly increasing development costs.
The cost of providing more product options can be done cost-efficiently by sharing the engineering, development, manufacturing and operational costs of a single underlying product platform across many market options. Implementing a standard product structure drives new product offerings to market faster and enables the re-use of parts across product variations. This modular approach to product definition increases a manufacturer’s ability to deploy variant design cost-effectively and helps guarantee accuracy of price proposals to ensure profitability of variant designs.
An effective variant design approach also brings cost advantages due to increased design reuse. Manufacturers can release an increased number of products that are simply modifications of existing products, meeting specific market needs without significantly increasing design and development costs. It also enables manufacturers to create a higher number of engineered-to-order product configurations that are leveraged from existing configurations.
Generating multiple variants of designs requires manufacturers to deploy the tools that facilitate managing the complexity of multiple variant configurations. Some form of a configuration management solution greatly aids the process by automating the generation of the bill of materials (BOM) and ensuring that all the compatibility rules between various feature options are respected.
The ability to manage a single, configurable BOM that integrates all the product’s subsystems (electrical, mechanical, software) makes it much easier and faster to spin off multiple variants of base designs. Other key enablers are part classification and search capabilities that facilitate and support component reuse.
Parametric-based CAD systems that deploy history-based modeling approaches also make it easier to develop and manage variant parts. The ordered structure of how these modelers create part models make it relatively simple to represent a part in multiple different configurations. By adhering to modeling standards to create the 3D CAD model, the model can be tweaked to support a family of variants by simply changing a parameter.
When generating a new design variant, manufacturers must first analyze the specific requirements for the variant, whether they are addressing customer- or market-specific needs. Then they must assess their current generic platforms to determine the one most appropriate for reuse in variant generation. Next, the variant options are specified and used to generate initial deliverables, such as 3D CAD models, drawings, and other documentation. The specific variant design is then edited and modified, as needed. Once the specific variant is generated, it is released to manufacturing, and the variant definition is maintained and modified, as necessary.
Product variability is a reality for today’s manufacturers, as “one-size-fits-all” no longer applies. By automating and optimizing their variant design and generation process, manufacturers can more quickly and cost-efficiently respond to their customers’ demands for more product options without adding cost and added time to the design cycle.
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