Concepts 

Definition

Describes a specific realization option for a component variant. All concepts that exist for a component variant are bundled in a concept group.

Use

You can use a concept as follows:

·        It is a general store of information. It contains descriptive texts that are significant for the phase of the solution search, but are not copied to the component variant.

·        It contains specific data that is transferred to the component variant in the advanced concept phase, such as material data, variable-size item data, classification data, and documents.

Structure

You can maintain multiple concepts for a concept group. Each concept contains information that is valid for one possible solution.

The following overview shows the essential data of a  concept, which is maintained on several tab pages.

Tab Page	Data
Concept data	The concept contains information that is valid for one specific realization option: ·          Digital mockup (DMU) document ·         Basic data for a material ·         Variable-size item data ·         Administration data
Classification	You use classification to maintain the class assignment for the concept. Classes of class type 056 (iPPE Variants) are defined for classifying concepts. The characteristic value assignment dataset contains the characteristics of all assigned classes.
Documents	The list contains all the documents that are linked to the concept group. The essential document data is displayed in the list: ·        Document key ·        Description ·        Status ·        Indicator showing whether the document belongs to a document hierarchy ·        Revision level  More detailed data of a document is on the document detail screen.
Text	The list contains the first 60 characters of each of the language-dependent descriptions. You can display the entire long text.
Relationship	The relationship between a concept and a node in a requirement structure is displayed here.
Basic Data	The administration data gives information about the creation of and changes to a concept.

Integration

Customizing

In Customizing for Product and Process Engineering, the settings for processing concepts are defined, such as the iPPE model assignment to concept group and concept. This assignment determines, for example, that you can assign any number of concepts to a concept group.

Choose Production ® Basic Data ® Integrated Product and Process Engineering.

Maintenance

You can only create and maintain concepts from processing functions for a product structure ( component variant).

The context menu of a concept gives you do the following processing options:

·        Copy

·        Delete

·        Rename