Balancing product quality, regulatory compliance and cost-effective market launches is a paramount challenge for manufacturers of intricate engineering products. As the complexity of both product engineering and manufacturing processes grows, the potential for extracting value from adept variant management becomes increasingly significant.
Effective product variant management implies that Bills of Materials (BOMs) are up to date, under change management, centrally governed, accessible across functions and well-maintained from concept to completion. Solving and validating BOMs is essential to ensure product and process data meet quality and compliance standards, and support effective decision-making as changes are introduced. Furthermore, I elaborated in a previous post on the link between product configuration, sustainability and supply chain resilience.
In its May 2023 release 27, Aras introduced three updates to their variant management PLM software aimed at enhancing continuous BOM configuration definition and validation. These updates include:
- Dynamic product structure resolution to create, maintain and use rule-based selection sets.
- Reusable usage conditions to manage product modularity usage with version-able rules, traceable through where-used analysis.
- Validation of variability definition across domains to view allowed configuration with Variant Management.
In this post, I discuss the value of effective variant management in driving product quality and compliance, linking to the recent solution improvements introduced by Aras.
Where BOM Variability Lives in Product Lifecycles
Product configuration sits at the intersection of sales, engineering and manufacturing. Per its May 2023 press release, Aras explains that “Product development expands from traditional mechanical engineering to true interdisciplinary systems engineering. The demand for more customer choices and innovative service offerings requires that companies adopt efficient ways to manage product variants. Defining and managing variants at every level of product representation is critical to controlling costs and staying competitive in today’s market.”
As John Sperling, SVP of Product Management at Aras, put it: “Product variant management used to be done using typical CPQ [configure, price and quote] tools during the sales process, but product complexity driven by pervasive connectivity, increasing software content and a high degree of customization is forcing OEMs to consider the basic tenets of variability management much earlier in the product lifecycle.”
Among other things like part release and change management, there are typically two key activities when it comes to BOM configuration (arrangement and composition of a BOM for a specific product or product version) and product variant management (handling of the different versions or variations of a product within a product line).
- BOM validation: the BOM must be validated for accuracy and completion before a product goes into production. This involves ensuring that the BOM accurately represents the product's design, that all components are correctly listed and that the BOM complies with engineering specifications and regulatory requirements.
- BOM solve: once the BOM has been validated and any issues have been identified during the validation process, the next step is to solve these issues. This could involve reconciling discrepancies, correcting errors, eliminating duplicate entries and making sure that all components are available and compatible.
In essence, BOM validation ensures the accuracy and compliance of the BOM, and BOM solve addresses any issues that might have been identified during the validation process.
Product component reusability is driven through BOM views, from engineering to manufacturing and service BOMs. Maintaining BOM accuracy and change traceability is paramount to achieving quality and compliance requirements. BOM validation is crucial to ensure that the product is built accurately according to design specifications and meets regulatory standards.
Effective BOM validation involves using reliable design data for accurate BOM creation. This encompasses verifying compatibility, ensuring regulatory compliance and conducting virtual testing. Feedback loops from production aid in improvement, highlighting the need for meticulous change tracking.
In practice, this means refining the BOM to necessary variations, potentially adding compatible options. Careful assessment avoids under- or over-engineering and errors. Continuous monitoring and adherence to established rules are crucial for identifying issues and evaluating new orders.
The BOM Variability Tools New to Aras
Linking to the Aras Variant Management improvements recently introduced, this implies the ability to:
- Load selection sets to reduce manual configuration, which is a foundational capability. Aras explains, this is part of the process of resolving a variable or multi-level structure. The software will also reassess the selected sets as they are loaded in case variability changes might invalidate the selection, at which point the user is prompted with a selection of valid options.
- Define and use usage rules within EBOM, MBOM and wherever applicable. This eliminates the need to re-enter the same condition manually by reusing usage conditions on contents and assets.
- Review and validate that the combinations and features are valid and defined as intended. To that effect, Aras claims that the Variant Management tool enables engineers to make these assessments in bulk. Users can also control the scope of the analysis by selecting which features and options are included.
Aras' Variant Management emerges as a potent tool for scrutinizing valid configurations within a given product line or sub-assembly structure, hinging upon user-selected variables. Such evaluations can play a pivotal role in detecting configuration voids and facilitating ongoing change impact appraisals. For many organizations, however, these assessments frequently entail manual derivation within offline Excel spreadsheets, leaving room for inaccuracies and errors.
For complex engineering products, the automation of these evaluations within PLM and ERP platforms presents transformative opportunities. This streamlining can significantly augment upstream validation of kit assemblies and effectively curbs the incidence of expensive downstream production mis-builds.
Expanding on this topic, it is interesting to note that Aras’ published product roadmap holds a backlog of additional Variant Management capabilities. It suggests that further improvements might be in the pipeline—such as the ability to create and maintain configurator contexts. These are likely to strengthen the ability to further automate and simplify BOM validation operations at source.