Design Profit’s “Variants” application can be used in one of 2 ways to produce valuable metrics for the product design or costing engineer. The option set symbols can be used to define particular models or production line types, such as a base model, luxury model, consumer model, professional model, or any other derivation that user chooses.
The second methodology that can be used is what we call an “assembly variant”, where the user can create multiple different design variants used to procure “side-by-side” comparisons with the products or sub-assemblies you are analyzing. This in turn, can be used to generate Executive Summaries or Variants Summary Reports which helps the user to easily analyze the differences between your designs. The user can then choose between the designs to make profitable business case decisions.
You can categorize this using all types of costs, quality, weights, process chains or any other metrics the user chooses, down to the granular level.
Variants help a user visualize how each product variation differs from the common architecture. With this knowledge, significant cost savings can potentially be realized by redesigns that incorporate appropriate parts of an assembly into the core design.
