Fulfilling customer's needs by the use of a variant configurator for dynamic product definition

To compete on the market two strategies are possible: price competence; diversification. As in many markets there is a heavy competition, this leads to rather low prices and therefore to small profits. If a company can diverse from its competitors and produce goods according to the specific needs of their customers it can charge higher prices and increase its profits. In many cases this can be done by adapting a basic product to the needs of the customer in some details, but not as a whole. Some production planning systems offer the functionality of a variant configurator. For this reason all possible components of the product have to be collected in a bill of materials (BOM). In the same way a list of all applicable work processes must be gathered. The final product itself is not defined in the system before an order is placed. A set of parameters is defined according to the customer needs. This set of parameters defines the final product and is customer specific. Now, after some calculation and logical comparison with the parameters, the correct amounts of correct materials are chosen from the bill of materials. Also, the needed work processes are set up and values for the process time are calculated. One result is the definition of the actual bill of materials and the schedule of job operations for the production of the customer specified product. Now the system finds out the stored costs of the processes and calculates the total cost of all operations at all work centres. Also the cost of the materials are calculated by their amount and their cost per unit. This way of calculating new products has two main advantages: new products can be calculated immediately by the system itself; and all changes in the costs of operations and materials are taken into account.