Implementation of a product data model to support variant creation process as a part of product lifecycle management

Nowadays the complexity in companies rises rapidly. Enterprises must be able to handle conflictive requirements: On one hand low internal variety in order to achieve low complexity within the company and on the other hand high external variety to cover as much customers as possible is aspired. The key concerning this complexity is to gain control of the variety in the product data to support the variant creation process. Product lifecycle management (PLM) provides the strategy to handle this problem by deploying a product data model. This paper describes a product data model and its implementation in a product data management system (PDMS) to support the variant creation processes as a part of the PLM strategy.