Traditional types of bills of material are rarely capable of structuring products with a substantial number of variants. European car manufacturers implemented solutions which are based on the STEP Application Protocol (AP) 214. These solutions are doing a better job at managing the relevant data, but we believe that users are not enabled to take active control of product variety, yet. Two areas are addressed in this presentation, where significant improvements could be achieved by guiding users to identify the right number of product variants, define the right product structure (in terms of levels and width). The approach described in this presentation focuses on assembled-to-order products with a very large number of variants. With some adaptations it can be applied to engineered-to-order products, too. The described approach shows a solution for companies suffering from increasing product variety in the following ways: The impact of new options respectively additional option values on each level of a product structure is made transparent, allowing to take immediate action (rather than performing laborious and costly analysis every now and then); Determining a product structure which is designed for variants (via an extended DSM); Additionally taking commercial information into consideration, it is possible to optimize the product structure according to commercial aspects, too.
Product structures designed for variants
Erzeugnisstrukturen, entwickelt für Varianten
2007
12 Seiten, 4 Bilder, 2 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Datenträger
Englisch
Optimization of Product Variants
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