Workflow for Defining Product Families
The following basic steps provide an overview of a process that a company may use for defining product families and creating product variants in Windchill:
1. Engineering or Marketing conducts an analysis of required product configurations:
a. Search Windchill for existing configurable products that can be used as the best starting point for this product.
b. Based on product features and characteristics, compile a list of options with possible choices.
c. Analyze relationships among choices to capture required, compatible, or incompatible selections.
d. Create specifications for each product configuration.
2. Create enterprise-wide definitions for an option pool of a Windchill product or library:
a. Based on a list of product features and product requirements, create options in a Windchill product or library context. You can reuse options from similar product families.
b. For each option, create possible choices.
c. Create rules to capture relationships among certain choices.
3. Create definitions for the product family:
a. Create an option set by referencing choices from one or several option pools. You can include options that were created for other product families.
b. Reuse global rules or define rules within the option set.
c. Assign the option set to the product’s container or to the configurable product (end item). The assigned option set determines:
▪ The choices that you can include in expressions that are assigned to parts and part usage in a product structure
▪ The choices that are available when filtering a product structure based on options
▪ The choices that are available when creating variant structures for a configurable product structure.
4. If necessary, create definitions for specific configurable modules (components of the product or different technologies):
a. Create options sets for individual modules to focus on product characteristics relevant to a product unit or technology.
b. Assign a discipline-specific option set to a particular component or container.
5. If certain components require a more sophisticated logic and user inputs for part selection, you can develop advanced selection logic and reference options from the option sets associated with the product.
6. Create and validate prototypes of module variants to validate the logic and the selection process.