What are the best practices for creating work instructions for products with lots of variants?

[Osen]

The company I work for makes a lot of products that are high-mix low-volume type. An example would be a cable with connectors on both ends. For any particular cable you can have a custom length and then each end could be terminated by several choices of connecors/ferrules etc.

So variant examples could be something like:
- CABLE1-CON1-CONA
- CABLE1-CON1-CON1
- CABLE1-CONA-CONB
- ETC

What are some best practices for making assembly instructions for products with lots of variants like this? Are instructions in one document based on the chosen cable and then sections for the connectors? Is every variant just a new product and making unique sets of documents is just inevitable?

Now there may be some special software for electrical cables in particular, but that was just an example. The company I work for has other products that are configurable. Managing the BOMs and work instructions is becoming tedious and so I'm not sure what a good solution is for this small company.

Thanks!

 

[geesaman.d]

There are documentation authoring softwares that work in content "chunks" that will compile a document based on a configuration. I researched them a few years ago but could not convince my company to adopt one.
Keyword is "DITA" or "structured authoring".

The cheap way is to write separate pages for each component and compile the product document from them with a good table of contents. What you don't want to do is set up a system where content gets copied over and over because that's a revisioning disaster.

 

[drawoh]

Osen,

If you have a product with two or more versions in production, you need to organize your documentation for it.

On a given fairly standard assembly, you should be able to define a sub-assembly that has all the common components. Each unique feature then gets its own final assembly and BOM.

--
JHG

 

[IRstuff]

You could do manually with some sort of mail-merge in Word, and possibly automate that using VBA

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm