Configuration Management

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Comprehensive management of configurations and baselines

The configuration management of products was developed in the aerospace technology as early as the middle of last century. The product complexity and the ensuing risk of there being an uncontrollability were especially high in this technology. In the meantime, the product complexity (mechatronics) and the number of variants have increased in almost all industries. That is why many companies require an easy to operate configuration management with matching IT support.

According to ISO 10007, a configuration description consists of the requirements for product design, realization, verification, operation and support. Configuration management is therefore a core process of Product Lifecycle Management.

ILC’s 4PEP Configuration Management complies with ISO 10007 and offers a holistic solution to describe a product in all respects during its entire life cycle. The solution does not only play a part in the phases of product development, but is also used to monitor the product in series production and service until the end of its life cycle.

Comprehensive Functionality with 4PEP Configuration Management

Product Structure Management

  • free definition of product structures (requirement structure, functional structure, development parts list, production BOM, sample BOM, etc.)
  • flexible networking of structures
  • structure comparison

Object Management

4PEP Configuration Management makes it possible to describe the product fully and holistically. It particularly focuses on comprehensive data from product development in addition to information from order processing (equipment, tools, batches, etc.).

Product Status Management

A product is constantly changing during its life cycle. This is particularly frequent during the different phases of the product development process, but also throughout the series production, during a product revision or in the service and maintenance operation. The management of the different product states during the entire life cycle is essential for the operative execution of business processes in the different departments. Business processes cannot work in the desired quality without correct and valid product data.

4PEP Configuration Management offers all necessary functions to manage product states and to make them available to the departments that handle different business processes:

  • Baselining: Freezing of all product information at a freely definable time (e.g., at the time of bidding, order acceptance, for the sample manufacturing, at the delivery, etc.);
  • Branching: Parallel provision of different product statuses (e.g., for the illustration of alternative developments);
  • Comparison: Flexibly definable comparison of any product statuses, graphic display of the differences;
  • Merge: Creation of a new product status by merging the contents of existing product statuses based on the information gained from the comparison;
  • History: Graphic display of all product statuses including the relationships and their statuses (which status caused which).

Process Management

It is the availability of product statuses for any business processes that leverages the full potential of configuration management. For this, 4PEP and its different solutions provide the ideal platform. For example, our solution 4PEP Engineering Change Management can be used to control change processes, whose execution ultimately leads to new product statuses in 4PEP Configuration Management. Product statuses that are derived for the prototype construction can be used in our solution 4PEP Sample and Prototype Management for manufacturing and delivering

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