ENOVIA provides companies the ability to manage the entire definition, planning and development of their product with or without configuration management. For an in-depth review of the ENOVIA configuration management, see the recording of the webinar: Introduction to the ENOVIA Configuration Management.

 Companies use these tools to define their product line and evolve it over time incorporating their product strategy. For example, your company produces a product line of construction equipment. The equipment is configured in numerous ways for different markets and applications based on variations in subassemblies and components and specific options. Examples of the “variants” and optional equipment are illustrated here:

Configurations within Configuration Management are dynamic in nature and drive the product offering of the company. They are based on the concept of a 150% product structure - a structure that contains all possible variants.

A specific resolved structure (100% structure) is determined by filtering the structure based on variants, rules, and options. The configuration variants offer a unique pathway into the product definition for SOLIDWORKS through its own CAD configuration capability. As SOLIDWORKS defines it, “Configurations allow you to create multiple variations of a part or assembly model within a single document. Configurations provide a convenient way to develop and manage families of models with different dimensions, components or other parameters.” This differs from the configuration management tools of ENOVIA in that they are geometric feature and parameter based configurations.

For our example, multiple buckets are configured within SOLIDWORKS to be used as variants supporting different configured models of a bulldozer within the product line. 

Let’s take a quick look at how the CAD configurations and resulting products are created in SOLIDWORKS.

Through the integrations to the platform, configured parts or assemblies in SOLIDWORKS saved to the platform create unique product definitions for each CAD configuration to expose the variants to the configuration management tools.