# Variant Management

## Introduction

Today, there is nearly no product available that does not use variants. No matter if its the Swiss watch with different dials or a ball pen in different model designs, all these products do have the same structure but they are distinguished by one or several features. The bills of material for those product variants do not show great differences, but they are differentiated by individual characteristics of each item (C1 - C2 - C3). These item types are refered to as Item Variants.

In order to prevent the requirement of creating a separate bill of material for products which differ in one point only, the variant management enables creating so-called Variant Wildcards which are set instead of Item Variants. The advantage of variant wildcards is, that they are based on a general structure from which many different structures can be derived. Therefore, the storage and management effort of variant BOMs is greatly reduced.

Hence, variant management enables the simplification of structures and therefore the clarity of bills of material. The amount of data is reduced to a great extend and data input is safer. In addition, the risk of possible data losses is significantly reduced.

Moreover, using variant wildcards enables creating order-specific BOMs, in which the ordered item replaces the wild card. I.e., Agile e6 creates a separate bill of material for each order (with the item variant C3). Variant management supports the following order-specific derivation process, i. e., Agile e6 creates the desired item structure with the desired variants for a specific order.

The variant management is closely linked to the item and BOM management; however, it may also be used directly within the workflow.