Products

Rethinking Product Configurator Software

By Susan Zimmerlee

With your current product configurator strategy, can you keep up with the variability demanded by your customers and still remain profitable? 

For an exclusive, inside look at Teamcenter Product Configurator, register for this webinar, “Strategies to Streamline Product Innovation by Managing and Optimizing Product Variations.”


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No matter what kind of product you make, your customers demand choices. Managing variability has often been thought of as a design problem. But the reality is that decisions are made about what products to offer long before a designer begins his work. And the implications of those decisions impact people across the entire lifecycle of the product.


As the demand for more advanced and varied product offerings continues to rise, we’ve found that companies are searching for a better solution. Take a look at this video about product configurator software inside PLM. You’ll see we’ve been thinking a lot about this too!

What if your product configurator solution was part of your PLM solution rather than a standalone system?


Imagine if you could seamlessly connect all the users contributing to your product definition across the lifecycle with a single definition of variability. 


What if your product and program managers could make decisions about what products to offer then provide that input directly to the rest of the organization?


What if your engineers could confidently develop solutions that will work for a range of valid configurations?


What if your manufacturing engineers could optimize assembly planning for different product variants and ensure consistency with design?


What if you can automatically generate user manuals and documentation for specific variants?


When a change is introduced (and they always are), what if you could accurately account for the planning and execution of that change across a wide breadth of users and data?

These are just a couple examples of the power of single definition of variability across the lifecycle. And it’s not a dream scenario in a far off land. With Teamcenter Product Configurator, you can do a lot of this today. And we have even more planned for the future.

Want to know more about what product configurator capabilities inside of PLM can do for you?


Take a look at some of these resources:


Rethinking Variability Mangement with Product Configurator Software inside PLM video


Beyond Product Configurator Software: Total Variability Management blog series


Guided Product Configuration blog


Product Configuration in Teamcenter

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/teamcenter/rethinking-product-configurator-software/