Contoso Industrial Pumps: Product Master or Eighteen Products?
Contoso Industrial Pumps manufactures centrifugal pumps at one site. Sales offers three configuration dimensions: seal type (mechanical or packing), impeller diameter (150, 200, or 250 mm), and motor rating (5, 10, or 15 kW). Engineering has created 18 separate released products, one per combination, each with its own BOM and route. Inventory of the same 200 mm impeller is split across six product numbers, MRP generates duplicate planned orders, and engineers maintain 18 near-identical BOMs. Only two BOM components vary by impeller diameter; seal and motor choices each change one component and add routing time. A sales manager occasionally asks for a custom paint color, fewer than 1% of orders. Contoso tracks inventory by site and warehouse only and does not use batch or serial numbers. The company is moving to a product master model and wants to know how far to take variant configuration.
1. Recommend whether Contoso should replace the 18 products with a product master and variants, and specify which dimensions should be configuration dimensions. Address the custom paint request.
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Use a single product master with variant-based configuration, not 18 products. The three offered choices are independent and produce 18 combinations, which is small enough for variant-based configuration; constraint-based configuration adds rule-writing overhead without a clear payoff. Set seal type, impeller diameter, and motor rating as configuration dimensions, because they drive BOM and route selection at order entry. Keep storage dimensions at site and warehouse and leave tracking dimensions empty, matching current practice. Do not add paint color as a fourth configuration dimension: it would multiply the variant space to 72 for under 1% of demand and force engineering to maintain variants nobody stocks. Instead, model custom paint as a separate service item or a manually added BOM and route operation on the specific production order, with a sales line note. Revisit constraint-based configuration only if options become interdependent or the option set exceeds a few hundred combinations.
2. How should storage and tracking dimension groups and units of measure be configured so that inventory and conversions behave correctly across variants?
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Assign one storage dimension group on the product master, with Site and Warehouse active; add Location only if picking is controlled by location. Do not activate batch or serial tracking, because the company does not need it and it would add mandatory number registration at every receipt and issue. Tracking dimensions cannot differ by variant, so decide at the master. For units, use EA as the base unit and keep purchase, BOM, and sales units as EA unless a supplier sells by weight; if motor variants have different shipping weights, capture weight as a product attribute rather than creating a catch-weight item. The key reasoning is that dimension groups and unit conversions are master-level settings: a variant cannot carry a different storage dimension group. If impellers are stocked as components, create them as separate released products with their own dimension groups, not as variants of the pump.
3. Describe how variant-specific BOM and route lines should be created and how consumption is calculated when a production order is created.
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Create one active BOM version and one active route version on the product master. On BOM lines, leave Configuration blank for components common to all variants, and set Configuration to the specific impeller diameter for the two lines that vary. At production order creation, the BOM explosion evaluates the selected configuration and includes only lines whose configuration is blank or matches; the same logic applies to route operations, so assign the configuration to the seal and motor operations that change time. Cost estimation uses the filtered lines, which prevents the 18-product duplication. Keep version activation dates so engineering changes can be staged. Test by creating a production order for each of the 18 variants and comparing estimated versus expected material and time. Do not use separate BOM IDs per variant unless a variant needs a structurally different BOM; configuration filtering is simpler and auditable.