Lean variation management: increasing business value with a diversified approach

Managing product variants and versions in an integrated way, e.g. to cope with the inherent complexity of product or solution portfolios, to reduce time to market, or to provide a coherent user experience to end users, is an ever increasing engineering challenge and competition factor in all business segments. Various engineering approaches including cloning, product or component platforms, product lines, production lines, and configurable systems are followed in practice to cope with the product variation in space and time. Unfortunately, there is no silver-bullet approach, and companies have to choose and adopt respective approaches in a deliberate way, but there is often only limited understanding of how to do so. Adoption problems, unexploited potential, wasted investments, frustration and disapproval are typical symptoms, which can be seen in consequence in the wild.