Master variant diversity with AI-supported analyses and the FIRE Engine. Reduce costs and optimise your product configuration.
A broad product range gives companies the opportunity to serve additional market segments and increase profitability. At the same time, however, it brings with it increasing complexity - and therefore growing costs, which often rise disproportionately.
In highly competitive industries, it is crucial to strike a balance between customised, high-quality solutions and efficient control of production and process costs. Strategic variant management is therefore a decisive success factor.
One key to this is the combination of artificial intelligence (AI), similarity analysis and the FIRE Engine. This framework supports manufacturing companies in clearly structuring the diversity of variants, reducing costs and increasing customer benefits at the same time.
Companies that do not systematically manage variant diversity run the risk of creating inefficiencies - be it through redundant components, complex configuration processes or overloaded resources.
These challenges can be overcome with the help of a similarity analysis. The process recognises similarities between components or product variants and suggests more cost-effective alternatives that are already available. In this way, diversity is consolidated without restricting customer benefits.
The FIRE Engine provides the right technological basis for this: it supports manufacturers in efficiently managing variants, optimising the configuration process and making targeted use of internal resources.
The FIRE Engine is a powerful framework for mapping a wide range of configuration models - from simple variant configurations to multi-level, complex solutions. It is suitable for scenarios such as
The FIRE Engine thus creates the basis for flexible, robust and efficient variant management.
Similarity analysis analyses products based on characteristic features. Differences within defined tolerances - such as the length of a component - are categorised as "equal".
The result: standard components can be reused, superfluous variants eliminated and resources utilised more efficiently. This means less effort and lower costs for the manufacturer and more favourable product variants and a better buying experience for the customer.
The FIRE Engine uses powerful algorithms to precisely recognise similarities and make them usable. One example is the optimisation of the engineer-to-order process: individual customer requirements can be met by reusing standardised components - and in a much more cost-efficient manner.
In this way, the FIRE Engine helps to reduce complexity, shorten time-to-market and at the same time increase end customer satisfaction.
To make the analysis even more powerful, the FIRE Engine can be combined with AI technologies and large language models (LLMs for short) in the future. This opens up new possibilities:
The FIRE Engine thus becomes the link between data, processes and users - and makes complex configuration tasks intuitively controllable.
The increasing number of variants in the manufacturing industry requires intelligent solutions. With the combination of similarity analysis, AI and the FIRE Engine, companies can streamline their product configuration, reduce costs and at the same time provide their customers with better, more customised offers.
Investing in future-orientated variant management now not only creates efficiency, but also lays the foundation for sustainable competitiveness.
Ibrahim Bicak
e-mail: martin.peters@adesso.de
