The expansion of CONTACT’s PLM module for variant management makes it even easier for companies to standardize their product portfolio. The new modularization features enable them to avoid redundant efforts, reduce costs, and accelerate product development.
A wide range of product variants presents both opportunities and challenges for companies. On the one hand, it allows products to be individually configured by customers and adapted to regional markets. On the other hand, the product portfolio can quickly become complex, driving up costs and slowing down development. With Variants, CONTACT Software provides a powerful module for variant management within its Elements platform, helping companies better organize product variety and efficiently manage a broad range of variants.
CONTACT has now added modularization functions to its variant management. These enable companies to further standardize their product portfolio, reduce complexity at the product level, and avoid duplicates. As a result, they can develop new variants more efficiently and flexibly and bring them to market faster.
A module is a reusable functional unit that can be integrated into different products. Unlike a component, a module is variable and is transferred into the product structure as a maximum bill of materials (BOM). For example, if a “gripper” module is integrated into a robotic arm, it adds all possible gripper variants to it. Rules can be defined in advance to specify how modules and products can be combined. For instance, a certain attachment may be specified for the “gripper” module based on the load capacity of the robotic arm.
The modularization features in CONTACT Variants particularly benefit companies with a large number of product variants: they can develop new products faster and more cost-effectively, leverage economies of scale in manufacturing, and simplify service. Any changes made to a module are automatically applied to all relevant products, accelerating change processes and reducing the risk of errors.
The extended CONTACT Variants has been available with the new release of CONTACT Elements since September. At the Open World 2024 from November 12 to 13, visitors can learn more about this and other innovations in CONTACT’s open low-code platform.
