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What is a variant?

Understand what a variant is and how it helps manage different versions of products or materials efficiently.

Dayvid Lorbiecke avatar
Written by Dayvid Lorbiecke
Updated this week

A variant represents a specific version of a product or material, distinguished by attributes such as size, color, or configuration. Variants are used to track and manage different types of the same item, ensuring precise inventory control and easy navigation.

Variants are managed on the product or material card. A product or material can have one or multiple variants. If you enable multiple variants, you can define variant codes, safety stock levels, and sales or purchase prices for each variant.

Example: You want to manufacture a particular wooden table? If you manufacture this wooden table in different sizes and colors, those are variants for this wooden table. Variants might include "Wooden Table Black Large," "Wooden Table Black Small," "Wooden Table White Small," and so on.

Why should you use variants?

Overall, using variants can save you a lot of time.

  • Creating variants using Katana's Variants configuration is much easier and faster than creating a separate product or material cards for each variant

  • Create and change product recipes and production operations centrally for all variants of a product. At the same time, you can also create variant-specific recipes from the variants set up on the parent product card.

Example: You manufacture a leather wallet that comes in five colors and three different textures. This means you have 15 variants of this product in total. One of the materials you use for manufacturing all these variants is a 0.4mm thread (i.e., it's included in the product recipe). Some other materials vary for those variants (e.g., color and type of leather). You wish to change the thread to a new 0.2mm thread. If you have created 15 separate products, you need to manually change the product recipe for each product. However, if you have used variants, you only need to change the product recipe for the parent product, and the recipes for all the product variants will be changed automatically.


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