Product Variant Master Design

Many manufacturing companies are expanding their product assortment, they make variants which fit different customers. As a result of this sales are increasing but not necessaryly the profit. The reason is that many variants cause higher overhead costs. Such market orientation can be very costly unless resuse of engineering effort, modules, parts and production equipment can be achieved.
The goal of this project is to identify a variant master or a template which can serve as the basis for designing customer specific variants in a modern feature based CAD system. The variant master consist of four elements: core models, variator models, rules and property models. The core model contains the part of the product which does not change, the variators are the subsystem or modules that have variation, rules can be production rules, structure rules etc., properties describe the behaviour of a product. In a design project a product variant is designed by superimposing variators on the core model.
The variant master has been implemented in an industrial company, Kværner Ships Equipment in Gothenburg by means of the feature based CAD system, Ideas. The effects from application are positive. The design time to design a customer specific variant is reduced by a factor 10 and the number of errors are decreasing due to improved documentation which suits relevant stakeholders, e.g. purchase, production and calculation.