In the explicit variant model, each operation belongs to one or more (possibly all) variants, meaning that the operation is only performed when a product of that variant (or one of those variants) is being assembled at the workstation. The following explains how an operation is assigned to variant(s) in the explicit mode only. In the implicit BOM variant model, an operation is more simply assigned a percentage of occurrence in the total production by linking it to a BOM node: see here how to achieve that.

    When your are using the variants navigator in the Operations Tab and you are using the explicit variants, you can see the precedence graph corresponding to each variant. For a given variant, some operations are not performed and are crossed out in red in that case (more on Operation representation here). On the top of each operation, you can see a row of small boxes representing the status of the variants for that operation. The box at the extreme left always represents the current variant. To toggle its status (present/absent in the current variant), just click on that box. Clicking the box will activate/deactivate the corresponding operation for the current variant. You can also directly click on the other boxes representing other variants, if you already know that they have to be active or inactive for the operation your are working on.

Operations and Variants in Explicit Variant Mode