Product Configuration Management

Launching a product or a family of products on the market and making it successful is a complex challenge that companies and industries need to face and overcome. Many concepts are conceived at a company in a sector, but only a small and carefully selected number actually reaches the market.

In the first phase of conception, it becomes important, if not fundamental, to generate product concepts that are in line with the positioning of the corporate brand and competitive with respect to market competition, as well as of undoubted interest to end users and other users.

The automotive industry in the modern economy increasingly requires total control at every stage of the lifecycle of a product and it is increasingly necessary to be able to manage the definition, documentation, planning and marketing of vehicles.

PRP, our 100% Custom Platform

Our PRP is a 100% Custom application platform that resolves these industrial market needs. The platform is integrated with all company systems (legacy) and with systems that support the configuration and sales process used by dealers.

The PRP platform features the following elements:

• Configuration

The life cycle of the process is highly configurable during the different phases of evolution of each product.

• Customization

It is possible to compose a specific model for the product by choosing certain features and options.

• Marketing

The marketing of the product is managed for each model configured.

• Monitoring

The system fully and consistently monitors the evolution of the various product models configured.

The application platform born about 30 years ago, now becomes a continuously evolving ecosystem open to the continuous addition of new applications and interfaces.

Product Definition

The platform allows the definition and commercial offering of the product and identifies which configuration options can be added and used and which can or must be recreated.

Market needs could, for example, require changes that allow a vehicle to be adapted to EU environmental regulations or a system of integration with new technologies that have evolved compared to the past and that can bring safety advantages through an improved user experience could be strategic (for example, speech recognition systems that are now integrated into vehicles that are also part of different market segments).

Having received all the necessary data in this first flow phase, the platform produces a feasibility analysis of the configurations, an in-depth analysis that also combines technical data on all the components of the vehicle, including mechanical ones, such as the combination of gearbox type and engine power.

From the analysis carried out by the platform, it is therefore possible to generate the “base vehicle” and define the cataloged list of existing components that allow it to be built and those potentially available that can be added.

This definition of the basic product generates the certainty that all components can coexist in the composition of the vehicle.

Planning the Offering

During the process of representing a product, it is essential to show the starting dates of the offering. For this planning analysis, it is necessary to create an information block, i.e. package the product definition and, through the platform, process the data flow in two successive phases:

Differentiation of the offering in terms of production dates to define when all the components can be produced in a planning table.

Display of the offering quota, i.e. definition of all the Part Numbers that make it up and place-time planning in relation to the manufacturing sector, possibly divided into different production plants.

Checking the relationship between the dates that have to be harmonized with one another in production subsequent to the offering is of particular importance.

The offering planning dates are checked by the automated flow over and over again to certify that they can coexist without problems and are uniquely defined.

With the offering planning flow, the platform creates the manufacturing engineering documentation.

Migration to the Commercial Sector

An initial commercial differentiation is generated during this final phase, in which, for example, some options are selected only for some specific areas or market periods.

All the differentiations created can be grouped and used to create packages that can make up commercial catalogs by identifying, first and foremost, the models that are ready for sale, as well as the various promotional and optional packages. This control allows the avoidance of errors during the final configuration of the vehicle, for example avoiding that an optional present in package “A” is priced twice because it is already present in the selected package “B”.

The data thus grouped can be shown to the SAP business process management platform and thus become available on the dealer side, so that the latter can quickly configure an order. Connection to the SAP system is bidirectional, so the configured order returns to PRP and is subjected to a configuration validation system to confirm its feasibility and trigger the new sales process flow with certainty.

Conclusions

PRP is an ecosystem of software applications that is representative of the production process that starts from the concept of a vehicle and analyzes the feasibility of the production process, from the components to the production dates, right up to the introduction of a commercial offering for sale on the market, guaranteeing that all the configurations available on the price list are achievable with the right criteria and within the timeframes defined by business needs.

The ecosystem of software applications is representative of the production process that starts from the concept of a vehicle.