Manage Variability and Reuse Aras Variant Management 

Aras has announced the availability of the latest version of its Variant Management application, which helps designers manage product platform variability on different product representation levels with full traceability and revision history, and to manage complex product configurations across all engineering domains and organizational boundaries.  

According to Aras, 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, the company says. It provides 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 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, the company says. 

“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 lifecycle,” said 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 automatic traceability of variability drivers and results which enables an efficient process of maximizing reuse, incorporating new product features, and performing change impact analysis.  

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.