Managing the enterprise BOP > Balancing a production line > Balancing a line with variants

Set up the data

You can define a production program that contains a set of variants of a particular product (a 120% BOM). For example, if you create refrigerators, you may produce multiple similar variants that you want to manage as one production program. The production program contains all the variants belonging to that product group. If you apply the production program on the Line Balancing Chart view, all the saved variant rules assigned to the product variants are applied on the structure within the collaboration context. Depending on the state of the Show Unconfigured Variant and Show Unconfigured Assigned Occurrences buttons, related BOM lines are configured out.

Procedure

Create a production program structure. As a root, create a Production Program Collection item. Under the collection, create a Production Program item, and under that, create a Production Program Definition item using File→New→Item and selecting the appropriate types.

Although you can create more than one production program within a production program collection, you can only have one production program configured into the production program collection (active) at the point when you apply the production program in the line balancing chart.

Under the newly created production program definition, add the product variants.The product variants are items of Product Variant type. A product variant item contains no structure itself, but by linking saved variant rules to the product variant, you specify the configuration of one machinable product. The saved variant rule specifies the item and its configuration for the product variant.
In the production program definition, specify the production rate with which each of the variants are produced.Teamcenter calculates the probability of each variant based on these production rates.
Save all the structures into a collaboration context that also contains the plant BOP and any supporting structures, such as product BOP, process, and product.

When applying a production program to a plant BOP, Teamcenter searches for the production program in the owning collaboration context.