Variant configuration

Highlights:

Knowledge management:

Incorporate product and configuration knowledge directly into your product structures.

• With the help of knowledge management, configuration knowledge can be thought through in advance, class-dependent and object-dependent, and generated directly.
• By using the knowledge centre in PPG, this knowledge can be used directly in SAP variant configuration.
• By using characteristic spaces and knowledge types, you always keep an overview of the classes and objects used in variant configuration and avoid redundancies.

Change management:

Make use of the comprehensive change management functions in PPG.

• Simple and complex multi-layer status networks in PPG.
• Integrated baseline management for representing changes.
• Change all data generated with PPG using a change number.
• Validity control based on the SAP change number.

Bill of materials creation:

Derive the bills of materials you need directly from the PPG data.

• Material bills of materials can be generated in the respective desired usages, along with sales order bills of materials, project bills of materials, equipment bills of materials and functional location bills of materials.
• This supports the Global Engineering and Global Production approach, in which production plants in a global network can be integrated via intercompany processes with the appropriate bill of materials type.
• The Factory Control Center (FCC) also enables you to automatically transform engineering bills of materials (EBOM) into manufacturing bills of materials (MBOM), in order to seamlessly integrate downstream logistics processes.

Manufacturing/remanufacturing integration:

Generate planned orders, production orders, ERP routings and manufacturing bills of materials directly from PPG. In addition, manufacturing data packages can be configured using SAP variant configuration. These can contain various manufacturing parameters and work instructions and be passed directly to the MES.

• In addition to manufacturing processes, remanufacturing processes can also be mapped and recorded as maintenance records.
• In this way, using SAP variant configuration, the actual remanufacturing scope can be determined after inspection and transmitted to the MES with the corresponding routing and components.
• Through integration into service and maintenance, equipment master records can be created, assigned or updated directly after remanufacturing.

Structure configuration:

Use templates, module libraries or guided structure copies for the simple and standardised creation of order-neutral or order-related structures with rule-based number assignment. For example, you can

• build, classify and inherit characteristic valuations for product and document structures.
• The structures can be built without master data and contain various views such as costs, dates, engineering, manufacturing, project assignment, service data, shipping planning and so on.
• The master data can subsequently be generated directly from the structure during the course of order processing.

Structure transformation: Carry out structure transformations from the CAD structure through to the manufacturing structure manually or automatically, and fully retrace them. In this way you can, for example, map the aspects of different manufacturing sequences in different plants, various logistical aspects of the assemblies, or bring in material items that are not taken into account in engineering.