To all of my Variant Configuration modelers out there, you all understand exactly what I’m talking about.  Your models are only as good as the information you have to work with.  I’ve modeled at quite a few different places, and more times than not, the information is always the bottleneck.  My current assignment is no different.  So it what brings me to my topic of the day, the value of good information for your VC models, and the format that it’s in.

In my travels, I’ve seen the extremes, good and bad.  I’ve seen notebook pages with scribbles, and I’ve seen fancy designed tools just for the documentation of the VC rules.  What I’m here to tell you is that you don’t need anything fancy.  In my experience, an excel spreadsheet with some standard formatting is more than you need.  Fancy tools will just cost you money, and in the long run, cost you time.  Because you still need to move all the information into the fancy tool.  Spend a couple of hours, put together a format you can read.  Work with the modelers and business people.  It’s really that simple.  I’m an engineer, so I like to start with the bill of materials first.  I’m a fan of listing out all the components, and then break down the rules that it takes to select each.  From there, it’s usually pretty easy to break it down and sort it out.

Then go into the sales/marketing rules.   The important thing here is if you can break things into tables or grids.  Remember, don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.  The more complex, the less likely anyone will update it or enter it properly.

So take me advise, if you’re just starting out, do it simple.  Use excel to build it.  Thanks for reading.

Ok…  so this is a long title, but in short, here’s the situation.  I have a global Multiple Value Characteristic and it allows additional values.  For one particular KMAT that will use this characteristic, I want to have one preset option available + the free text, and exclude everything else.  In the classification, I set only the single value to be shown, but the problem is that it is automatically selected as well, and it shouldn’t be.  Since the characteristic is to allow customers to enter in free text to denote a special, I don’t want anything populated for a value unless the customer actually enters something in there.

Now, thanks to my friends at the CWG, in particular Steve Schneider, they came up with a great trick.  He gave this simple process for the Multiple Value Characteristic, and it works great.

1) Remove the multi value char from the existing class assigned to the KMAT.

2) Create a NEW class containing only the multi value char.

3) Assign the new class as a SUPERIOR class to the existing KMAT class using transaction CL24N

4) While assigning the superior\subordinate class in CL24N, double click on the multi value char and select the single value you want available.

5) Save

6) Go into CU50 and see the results… You should see NO value specified, and when you specify the multi value char, all you should see is the single value and the free text field..

It really was that easy to restrict a global Multiple Value Characteristic, and works like a charm.  Thanks Steve.

Well, since I was talking about the PMEVC the other day, I thought I’d throw out the other biggest piece of functionality that I found helpful.  That’s the improved editor for object dependencies and constraints.  There are 2 big pieces that are absolutely a hit in my book.

The first piece is the editor.  It’s finally a text based editor that is easy to use.  You can use standard copy and paste, no longer do you need to to use the cryptic I9 command into the line number to add more lines.  You can just hit enter.  It’s also very easy to use the find and replace, copy and paste, etc.

The second part is that you can actually use a nice little Input help button.  It’s a hand/question mark looking button.  If you start a statement, it will tell you the options of what you enter next.  This is especially nice for constraints if you forget the key words (like I often do.  ha ha ha).

Short story, if you have access, I recommend doing your PMEVC to do your dependency coding.

Happy Modeling,

Well, I’m still rolling on the variant configuration track.  Today is a new revelation that I recently discovered.  In some of my previous contracts I’ve had to set up some rather large interface design tabs.  Often consisting of 20 – 50 characteristics.  If you’re at all familiar with the original tool for creating/updating the interface design, you know how clunky it is.  You have to manually page through the list of characteristics, and even click the checkbox in the appropriate sequence so they show up where you want them.  It’s not challenging, but it certainly is tedious.

What I found is that the PMEVC actually has a great tool for creating and updating the interface design.  Instead of doing the hunt and click method of adding characteristics, you can just type them in.  You still have the option to select a bunch of characteristics in a method similar to the old method.

On top of everything, you can even easily change if it’s a tab or a sequence, or flag it as Sales or Engineering, just by flipping a tab.  So much easier than hunting through a cryptic menu to find the characteristic grouping.

All in all, I’m pretty excited about this.  I was thinking about writing a utility to upload the interface design from an excel sheet, but after finding this functionality, I don’t really need a need for that.  Hope you’ve already found this trick, if not, enjoy the nice interface =)