Application support to product variety management

Offering a large variety of products at competitive prices and reasonable delivery times is a complex managerial challenge that many companies have to address. Software vendors responded to this challenge by developing and proposing various solutions, such as product configuration ( PC) systems, product data management (PDM) systems and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The relative newness, complexity and mutual interdependencies among these systems make it difficult to understand how they-individually and as a whole-actually support a firm in managing its product variety. Precisely these complexities, ultimately, add to the risks of software selection, leading companies to make inconsistent choices or to implement the wrong systems. Starting from this theoretical and practical concern, the present paper provides a conceptualization of the essential functions of PC, PDM and CRM systems, discussing how these functions help a company to manage its product variety and how they relate to each other. This paper proposes that two core data structures of PC systems namely the sales and technical configuration models-are essential elements of the information management infrastructure of a company offering a large variety of products, because they enable a number of important product variety management functions also present within PDM and CRM systems.