Product Variant Design---considerations, motivations and best practices

Brief introduction

To understand when and how to design product variants, be careful to observe the differences between products. Two different types of trucks, for example, may have more than 10 or more different characteristics.

Usually, the enterprise has no design variant at first because of the lack of market experience of the new product. Product development teams tend to target specific customers or use cases when they initially develop the product. With the gradual start to collect customer feedback on the product, the need for multiple variants of the initial product began to emerge. If product variants are not effectively developed, the task of maintaining and improving multiple product versions can be inefficient and time-consuming due to repetitive work.

Maintaining similar software code across a variety of products alone will take up more development resources than the product variants from the outset. If you create unnecessary repetitive work for each variant, eventually you will not be able to respond quickly enough to the customer's new requirements for the variant. Because of this, the new product development process, which includes variant management, has become an inevitable trend.

Identify product variant requirements

The design of the variant depends on the market maturity of the product and the perception of the customer's willingness to use the product. When companies launch new technologies, the hardest part is determining how customers will take advantage of this new technology. Existing customers are not sure what changes they need. Because the market is uncertain, the focus is on getting the product out of the enterprise door and understanding the specific performance of the variant, rather than building a "product mix" or design variant.

After the success of a product, the company will gain sufficient market intelligence, and the knowledge of which product variants the market really needs will become clearer. For example, Craig Jacobs, a systems engineering design manager for Eaton's Automotive group, said they used the "clone own product" approach to produce a variant of the first medium hybrid car gearbox, as shown in Figure 1. They first made a copy of the first product and then made a modification on that basis. At the time, they were not aware that the company needed a complete variation management process. New designs with some new components and software meet the needs of the customers. Thereafter, the Eaton company maintains the two products separately.

However, when making improvements to one variant of the product, they also need to replicate the improvements to the second variant product. This approach is not as efficient as real reuse, because reuse can automatically include changes in a bug patch in a variant into the second variant. As the number of necessary variants increases, the inefficiencies of cloning proprietary products are becoming increasingly apparent.

Figure 1. Eaton Design of truck parts

The same enterprise's basic hybrid transmission system architecture may be the same across the globe, but each customer needs to be flexible to connect to different engines. The electric motors of these engines have different rated power and the battery capacity varies. Customers in different automotive markets also need to increase or reduce auxiliary electrical equipment, such as AC power, heating equipment, power steering devices, etc.

Other industries have similar reasons for building variants. Development variants require the determination of product behavior, segmentation of behavior as attributes, and improvement of attributes. You can then develop variants based on the design rules. If variations are taken into account when designing the system initially, you can reasonably predict the timing of variations. This approach can be very simple, such as building a clear interface, or it can be very complex, such as marking the artifact as a potential location (variant point) that might require a variant.