What is Variant Configuration in SAP?

The easiest way to understand what Variant Configuration means is using the example of a car manufacturing. Let’s say a specific costumer orders a BMW Model X5 with the following Characteristics:

- Exterior color: Blue
- Interior color: Beige
- Internal Trim: wood
- Transmission: automatic
- Package: Premium

Given those Characteristics the system will need to able to:

- Place the Customer order (Make to Order)
- Calculate the price (Variable Pricing)
- Plan the work in the manufacturing site (Planning/Scheduling)
- Create Production orders to start the production utilizing all the variants that the customer asked for i.e. Colors, Trims, Transmission, etc
- Create purchase order to purchase all required materials to produce the car

So, the brand and model of the vehicle remain the same, but the characteristics are different. Based on the characteristics, some rules will need to take place. In SAP, those rules are called dependencies.

An example of a rule (dependency) could be: if characteristic package = Premium therefore, the car will have a Sunroof, heated seats and 19” wheels. Based on this dependency, many other dependencies can be triggered. It will depend on the manufacturing process and how the business process works. As now we know that the car will have a Premium Package, we will need to capture these information and send them to the purchasing department so they can supply all raw materials required to build it.

Also, the production area will need to plan and schedule, when and what is the best way to build the car, considering their manufacturing capacity and their lead times. After the plan is in place, the production process can start based on all given information taken from the customer order.





This is fairly high level explanation. Variant Configuration can be very easy or extremly complex depending on the process and rules applied for a specific manufacturing industry.