Harmonise Your Items

VariMatch is a tool for item classification and for the harmonisation of item data originating from various sources. An item can be any entity that is managed in a PDM system and has its own identifier. Items include product components, documents and work items.

Harmonisation and Classification of Item Data

An item records a number of properties, such as the diameter of a sealing ring or the resistance of an electric resistor. Often these properties are included in the identifier of the item. However, as the number of items increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage item properties by means of item identifiers. The same component may appear with different identifiers in different documents.

VariMatch allows a company to harmonise its item data. VariMatch reads textual item data (which can, for example, have been generated from Excel), extracts the properties of the items from their textual descriptions, and classifies the items according to the properties. The item and its properties can be stored in VariPDM.

The properties can be used for finding if the same item with the same properties has been recorded multiple times in the database. In this case, one of the identical items must be selected as the “correct” one. Its identifier then becomes the only allowed identifier for the item, and references to the other identical items must be replaced with the selected identifier.

The properties of items are extracted from the textual descriptions by means of classifier patterns. The interactive VariMatch tool allows a user to teach the tool that particular types of text segments in a description provide particular values for particular properties of the item. After this has been done, VariMatch is able to extract the properties from all descriptions with the same format. The mechanism for teaching classifier patterns makes it possible to use VariMatch in various branches of industry.

How to Process Item Data from Customers

Many companies receive item data from various sources. For example, when a subcontractor receives an order for a component from a customer, the order may include manufacturing instructions for the component. Manufacturing instructions from different customers may refer to same items but use wildly different ways to specify their properties.

VariMatch allows the subcontractor to reconcile the item specifications from different customers with the items in the company’s own VariPDM database. After the company has defined classifier patterns for the specifications used by a particular customer, VariMatch extracts item properties from the specifications sent by the customer and finds the corresponding items in the company database.

The patterns for a particular customer are stored in VariPDM so that the same patterns can be used for analysing further orders from the same customer.