If this company had used the Avenue Managing VC application it would have been a simple matter of comparing the model before the change and after the change. The model compare report would illustrate what changed and show it in color what was deleted, added or changed.
Variant Configurator models should be changed using a process that allows for the changes to be made not in production and reviewed by someone else and allow for some collaboration on tasks to be done to finish the change and formally approve the change. Even in a small organization, someone has to be held accountable to make sure your changes matched the request or original specification. Unfortunately, until very recently, there was no easy way to find a change or even document a VC model. 
Being able to track the change from the original specification and review only the changes without having to skip through the entire product model is a huge help. Users have noted that they save from 30 to 40% of their time in tracking down changes. We had one person note that what the "Avenue Managing VC solution did in 2 minutes what took me 2 days to find". "I was told that there was no change made and I knew differently and it took me 2 days to find the change that someone said they did not change". "I knew it was there".
If your organization reviews changes once a week for a model or reviews the changes just prior to moving to production or QA, how easy would it be for you to run an application and have in a matter of minutes a Compare Report of all the changes made since the last model version? Most say that would be a huge help. The Model Compare capability IS available (one page example above) plus you can document the model in an easy to use navigable PDF report.
Tell us how you track your changes. We would like to hear about how VC modelers and VC Team leads do this. We think we have a better way, but we would like to hear how you do it and we want to improve our products from real live customer scenarios. Leave a suggestion here or let us know by going to Contact Us and leave us a note.
