Mastering variant management is essential for staying competitive in today’s engineering scenario. When designing and maintaining systems, it’s crucial to understand the degree to which your system can be configured to meet customer needs. Managing stakeholders and system requirements is the foundation. How can individual system elements be replaced or added to support different customer demands? What is your system’s modular level? Managing the system architecture by RFLP—its Functional, Logical, and Physical structures—and linking it back to the Requirements is key.
The underlying question remains: does a component or solution add value to the customer, or is it simply the result of years of incremental development? This interview focuses on how variant management and CPQ work together to address these challenges, offering insights into creating effective, customer-focused solutions.
To talk about this approach, we turn to one of Scandinavian Digital’s key experts, Christian Farsø, a senior consultant with a wealth of experience in System Engineering, Modularization, System Architecture, and Requirements Management. With nearly a year at Scandinavian Digital, Christian has elevated the level of project management and delivery through his customer-focused philosophy. He emphasizes the importance of amplifying variance that creates value while eliminating inefficiencies that do not serve the client.
In this interview, Christian provides a fresh perspective on how to Master Variant Management and CPQ.
Q – Let’s start talking about Variant management and how it is important to stay competitive – where to start?
A – When designing and maintaining a system design it is crucial to know to which degree your system can be configured. What is required by the customer – Manage the stakeholder and system requirements. The question is: How are individual system elements replaced or added to support different customer needs – What is the modular level of the system? The start is managing the system architecture (Functional, Logical and Physical structures) and the link back to the stakeholder requirements and then the underlying question is always: Does a component or solution add value to the customer or is it simply a result of numerous years of incremental development?
Q – Now CPQ is the focus to continue our conversation, based on your experience and knowledge of systems engineering and modularization, what do you see as the key challenges?
A – Often system knowledge is documented in various formats, for spreadsheets and various documents. Some better than others but often we see a few experienced engineers which just knows what is right and wrong. This means knowledge is not structured by the same template nor to the same degree of detail. With CPQ we start documenting the system architecture to create a common language between stakeholders. Keeping track of what is needed and important to the customer and which individual solutions are offered to the customer is documented. What the customer wants and how the system can be configured/engineered is not always aligned.
Q – You have also been managing CPQ projects and talking about Systems architecture. In what ways does system architecture impact the effectiveness of Configure, Price and Quote?
A – When you get a common understanding of what the system needs to do or provide + how the system is built, you have the basis of the system architecture. Both the configuration offerings and the physical (modular) structure which can be either E-/M-BoM are essential in building the CPQ solution.
Q – What is the relationship between variant management and the concepts CPQ, especially regarding requirements and physical structures?
A – The concept is typically structured on 3-4 levels if systems engineering principles are incorporated. The stakeholder and systems requirements are often reflected in the front end of a CPQ solution which again is linked to the physical structure of the system architecture.
Q – So, the conclusion is that companies working with aspects of Systems Engineering like systems architectures and variant management can benefit from applying CPQ/DA in their organization
A – Yes, for sure. Working with systems engineering and system architectures can be an enabler (but not a prerequisite) for a CPQ or Design Automation solutions which improve both engineering quality, throughput and performance of the ordering and design process.
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