Product Variants and more
Do you have a grip on the diversity of your products, or do the product
variants take control of you?
You are not on your own, if the latter is true. Many organizations are in a
similar situation – often because market forces pressure businesses to
constantly expand their product portfolios. While being in “good
company”, you should definitely not lean back and relax.
Managing Product Diversity
Literature, research and management consultancies deal with diversity of
product variants, but unfortunately the focus is typically not on design and
development – even though this is where you would have the biggest
lever. Solutions that simplify the generation of additional variants are
certainly of help, but existing challenges are mainly shifted to downstream
areas (and neglected), unless you have the right foundation: a suitable
approach to structure your products.
So how would you rate your approach to managing product diversity?
Product Structuring
Doing a good job in product structuring primarily requires a bill
of material (BOM) type matching your needs. There are various
relations between items (assemblies or single parts) in a BOM, as well as
between these items and describing documents (such as requirements,
specifications, drawings, CAD models, wiring diagrams, software modules,
assembly instructions, test reports, and manuals).
Several BOM types are available: explicit BOM, BOM with common parts,
Plus/Minus BOM, Matrix BOM and various kinds of rule-based bills of
material.
Having chosen the right BOM type for your organization, another question needs to be answered: what is the best approach to organize your products? More precisely one could ask: which ‘Depth’ (number of levels in the BOM) and which ‘Width’ (number of parts within an assembly) would comply with a typical product structure and on which level would you allocate configurable items?
The correct decisions and answers to these questions heavily depend on the individual conditions in your organization.
Individual Situation within your Organization
Specific influencing factors can be crucial to your organization. These include:
- Supply chain strategy (built-to-stock respectively made-to-forecast, assembled-to-order, engineered-to-order)
- Number of product families
- Typical number of variants for a given product family
- Ability to configure a product: amount of options; applying a closed (limited) or an open (unlimited) configuration process
- Conditions in production and assembly
- Limitation of fixed capital
- Targeted delivery time
Professional Consulting Services
ZAGEL Consulting can help you in this complex environment.
Consulting services will always be jointly defined in accordance with your
individual requirements and constraints. A well-proven procedure is composed
of the following activities, of which the relevant ones will be applied:
Analyze: abstracting from complex facts to reveal
‘relationships’ and hidden patterns.
Design: creative and experience-based problem solving;
Examining the situation from different angles whilst taking all your specific
circumstances into consideration.
Facilitate: finding agreement within your teams; Combining
and building bridges; Defining and conciliating solution concepts.
Compile: aggregating commonly agreed solution concepts in
high-quality documents.
Present: authentic and convincing presentation of solution
concepts for your team and/or your management.
Evaluate: jointly evaluating and rating implemented
solution.
So who is going to implement the agreed-upon solution concepts? The choice
is yours:
If you run an experienced team, you can execute the required activities
internally. Should you already work with a proven service partner, you may
probably want to continue this cooperation. If you are lacking a reliable and
professional service partner for the implementation work, ZAGEL Consulting
can arrange suitable contacts.
Note: Individual consulting services also means not imposing any solutions upon you. Sound solutions which are already in-place and you are happy with will not be questioned provided, of course, they satisfy identified requirements.
Back to the overview of Services.