Introduction
Ever-changing customer needs and evolving products requires greater business agility. Effective Configuration Analysis is essential to ease decision-making and easily analyze products containing complex and high variability.
The Configuration Engineer (CFG) role allows you to define effectivity by mapping product instance (In the 150% Definition) with the appropriate variant value or option defined for the model. Maintaining all variations within a single configured structure enables optimization and product reuse that leads to reduced maintenance cost, real-time and faster conversion to required configuration.
Select by Configuration Criteria
The “Select by Configuration Criteria” option in the Product Structure Editor app provides the intuitive interface to perform configuration analysis. This can be used to:
- Get granular understanding of configured structure.
- Easily visualize and analyze the type of effectivity used in the configured structure.
- Perform impact assessment before making any changes
- Verifying the configured structure
Image 1: The “Select by Configuration Criteria” option in the Product Structure Editor app
The “Select by Configuration Criteria” dialog box provides three options that you can use along with the configuration criteria to highlight required/affected product instances. Let us look at some examples to understand the importance of each option.
Common:
You can select this option to easily identify and highlight product instances whose Effectivity Expression is compatible with the Selected Configuration Criteria.
Example 1: In the configuration criteria, when you select Counter Weight = Static, all the instances except the one for which the Effectivity Expression is set as Counter Weight {Smart} are highlighted. This can be used to find out all the instances that are compatible to use the selected configuration criteria.
In this example,
Variant Name: Counter Weight
Variant Values: Static, Smart
Image 2: “Common” option in the “Select by Configuration Criteria” dialog box
Example 2: In the configuration criteria, when you select the variant and all its variant values, the following product instances are highlighted:
- Product instances whose Effectivity Expression does not contain any of the selected variant value
- Product instances that does not have any Effectivity Expression applied
This can be used to find out product instances that remains unaffected if you decide to update these variant and variant values.
Specific:
You can select this option to easily identify and highlight product instances whose Effectivity Expression (Partially or Completely) match with the selected Configuration Criteria.
Example 1: In the configuration criteria, when you select Bucket Shape = U, all the product instances whose Effectivity Expression contains the Bucket Shape {U} are highlighted i.e. all U shape buckets are highlighted.
Example 2: In the configuration criteria, when you select Bucket Shape = U and Bucket Size = 800, single instance for which Effectivity Expression contains Bucket Shape {U} AND Bucket Size {800} is highlighted.
Image 3: “Specific” option in the “Select by Configuration Criteria” dialog box
Image 4: Product instance is highlighted in the structure and in the 3D
Where Used:
This option is useful to find out product instances in which one of the selected configuration criteria is used.
Example: In the configuration criteria, when you select Bucket Shape = U, S, and L, then all the instances for which Effectivity Expression contains Bucket Shape {U} or Bucket Shape {S} or Bucket Shape {L} are highlighted.
Image 5: “Where Used” option in the “Select by Configuration Criteria” dialog box
Image 6: Product instances are highlighted in the structure and in the 3D
Note: The “Common” and “Specific” options are introduced in the R2022x FD02 release.
Refer the following video for more information on this functionality.
