An eye on everything – Variants cockpit with Soley
“Soley Studio is the ideal tool to further develop our analysis methods in an agile and visually tangible way. We are already creating more transparency in our product portfolio and can make our variant management much more efficient and effective in the short to medium term”.
Christian Gramm (Head of Chassis Systems Layout Department)
Product Portfolio Transparency in a Variants Cockpit
Variance Meets Internal Efficiency
In the commercial vehicle sector, manufacturers win their customers in particular through highly customizable products. Unfortunately, this market-sided variance not only acts as a success factor, but is also the decisive driver of internal variance at the product and parts level and thus a considerable cost factor. The associated complexity can be kept in an efficient balance by modular product architectures.
Objective: Variant Efficiency
Objective: Variant Efficiency
MAN is aiming to optimize its existing modular systems in the mid-term. This also involves significantly reducing complexity by identifying and reducing irrelevant variance. The establishment of a monitoring system is also intended to create the basis for tracking, evaluating and strategically managing and evaluating the influence of changes to the product portfolio over time.
The central instrument for the implementation is the variant cockpit, with whose help managers on different levels can evaluate and visualize current data from different company areas at any time at the push of a button. The analyses required for this include bills of materials and sales figures in particular.
Realization
The evaluations and diagrams defined jointly with MAN contain key figures such as the number of variants and components, the proportion of non-variable parts, unit number coefficients, exclusive parts and analyses of added and removed components and assemblies:
- Import and networking of data records from purchasing, development and sales (approx. 1.3 million data points per month)
- Handling of inconsistencies in data sources and consolidation in a uniform data graph
- Calculation and visualization of various points in time as key figures, courses of time, diagrams and tables in dashboards.
- Linking views in drill-down analyses
- Ability to filter manually, e.g. to filter out products that have a certain proportion of identical parts.
How MAN benefits
The solution enables continuous monitoring of modular quality, cost efficiency and product complexity in varying degrees of detail:
- Fast and stable software solution for continuous variant management and up-to-date analyses at the touch of a button
- Direct identification of potential savings in the variant portfolio
- Management-capable preparation of complex technical-economic interrelationships for fast and data-based decision-making
- Interactive dashboards provide quick access to relevant details, whether at your desk or in team meetings.
- Standard exports enable convenient use in other BI tools or presentations
Soley – Ideal Approach for MAN
- Fast results due to agile project approach
- Soley brings expertise in product portfolio and variant management.
- The analysis knowledge is visible, modifiable and expandable for MAN experts (source code).
- The solution from data import to visualization avoids critical interfaces.
- Analyses and dashboards enable the involvement of all stakeholders in the early avoidance of complexity.
- If desired, the data never leaves the company network at any time.