Featured Product
This Week in Quality Digest Live
Customer Care Features
Leah Chan Grinvald
Independent repair shops are fighting for access to vehicles’ increasingly sophisticated data
Gad Allon
Aligning timing, leadership, and strategy is complicated
ISO
Delivering quality to the health industry
Mike Figliuolo
Globalization is an unstoppable trend, so why not take advantage of it?

More Features

Customer Care News
A tool to help detect sinister email
Developing tools to measure and improve trustworthiness
Manufacturers embrace quality management to improve operations, minimize risk
Scaling operations to reduce plastic waste in oceans
Survey shows 85% of top performers rely on it to achieve business objectives
Educational offerings available in Santa Clara in December 2023
Precision cutting tools maker gains visibility and process management across product life cycles
A Heart for Science initiative brings STEM to young people

More News

Quality Digest

Customer Care

Aras Variant Management Enables Variability and Reuse Across All Product Representations

Users can define product platforms while increasing quality, lowering cost, and shortening time to market

Published: Wednesday, June 14, 2023 - 11:00

(Aras: Andover, MA) -- Aras, which provides a powerful low-code platform with applications to design, build, and operate complex products, announces the latest version of its Variant Management application. This application delivers capabilities designed to manage product platform variability on different product representation levels with full traceability and revision history. It also enables designers of next-generation products to manage complex product configurations across all engineering domains and organizational boundaries.

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.

Aras Variant Management enables companies to establish a consistent approach to defining and managing variability as an essential element of their product strategy. It provides unprecedented flexibility to define product platforms and maximize module reuse while reducing cost of quality, lowering development cost, and shortening time to market. Using high-performing, functionally rich and intuitive user interfaces, engineering and business teams across the organization can easily define and validate product variability features, options, and rules to configure specific product structures.

The application maintains separate data models for rules and for breakdown structures in any domain, enabling reuse of both in a new context. This shortens development time of new variants, simplifies conflict resolutions of rules, and allows all domain-specific development teams to participate in the process.

“Product variant management used to be done using typical CPQ 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 life cycle,” says John Sperling, SVP of product management at Aras. “Aras Variant Management enables all engineering and business teams to participate in the context of their product representation level.”

With Aras Variant Management, all variant definition information is maintained as part of the tool-agnostic product digital thread managed by the Aras platform. This ensures that variability drivers and results are automatically traceable, which enables an efficient process of maximizing reuse, incorporating new product features, and performing change-impact analysis.

To learn more, visit Aras’ website or see its demo to watch Aras Variant Management in action.

 

Discuss

About The Author

Quality Digest’s picture

Quality Digest

For 40 years Quality Digest has been the go-to source for all things quality. Our newsletter, Quality Digest, shares expert commentary and relevant industry resources to assist our readers in their quest for continuous improvement. Our website includes every column and article from the newsletter since May 2009 as well as back issues of Quality Digest magazine to August 1995. We are committed to promoting a view wherein quality is not a niche, but an integral part of every phase of manufacturing and services.