Strategies for Configurable Materials

Definition

A configurable material is a material for which different variants are possible.

The strategies for configurable materials allow you to plan products with an almost unlimited number of possible combinations of characteristics and combination value keys. Use these strategies if you want to plan a product that uses a feasible combination of characteristic values and that does not include final assembly. Typical examples of such products are cars, elevators, forklifts, trucks, buses.

Variants, as described in

Material Variants, could not be used to plan these products because you had to create billions of variants. Entering usage probabilities for characteristic values instead allows you to plan materials that have a large number of variants. This procedure also improves change management for the components because planning is separated from construction changes.

Structure

A configurable material can have a few or very many variants, as the following examples demonstrate:

A personal computer may have several more characteristics. For example, hard disk capacity, casing, CPU, country version, color.
A car may have up to several hundred characteristics, each in turn having many characteristic values.
An elevator consists of a large number of characteristics, but cannot even be assembled without having to construct new parts for each elevator.

The number of characteristics and characteristic values (in other words, the variance) of a material is a key factor when choosing the right planning strategy. Planning a few variants differs drastically from planning thousands or millions of variants. Before you choose a planning strategy for a configurable material, you must consider the possible number of variants.

A personal computer could be produced with two different types of hard disk, three casing types, two CPU types, two country versions, and three colors which results in 72 variants
(2 * 3 * 2 * 2 * 3).
A car with several dozen characteristics could result in a million variants.
An elevator could have millions of standard variants, and an unlimited number of additional variants, produced specifically to meet customer requirements.

Integration

By choosing an appropriate approach to planning, you can reduce the complexity of planning. For example:

You use consumption-based procurement for inexpensive components and some software components. The result is you plan expensive components only. For instance, you may only want to plan CPU types and casing types, resulting in six variants.
You can also use similar approaches to planning for more complex products such as cars and elevators.
Reducing the number of variants simplifies the planning of configurable materials. Up to a certain complexity, you could plan at finished product level. For example, you could plan the number of different personal computers, such as 100 desktop PCs with a Pentium processor, and 80 tower PCs with a 486 processor.

There are two possible approaches for planning complex products such as cars:

If you allow your customers to configure the product completely, you can plan the components directly, using the strategy Planning at Assembly Level (70), for example. This approach would result in one set of planned independent requirements for all components (which are not procured on the basis of consumption or controlled by Kanban). You could enter these planned independent requirements manually, but to simplify the process you may want to plan the characteristics directly, and have the system automatically generate the planned independent requirements for the components (see strategy 89). It is also possible to use Characteristics Planning w/ Dependent Req'ts (56).
Another approach, which is possible even for very complex products such as cars, is to define a set of material variants (previously known as stockable types) which are produced using a make-to-stock strategy. The advantage of this approach is that your customers are immediately provided with products from stock. The disadvantage is that customers cannot fully configure the product. They must buy goods from stock.