CEVT Relies on Product Configurator as Single Source of Truth for Automotive Variants

CEVT (China Euro Vehicle Technology AB), Geely Group's innovation center based in Gothenburg, Sweden, faced a foundational challenge common to modern automotive R&D: managing explosive product variability across shared vehicle platforms. As CEVT pushed toward modular development — designing components reusable across multiple models and markets — the complexity of tracking which features applied to which configurations grew unmanageable. Without a centralized system, variant data was fragmented across teams, creating inconsistencies that slowed engineering decisions and risked costly errors propagating through design and manufacturing.

Building on an initial Teamcenter deployment for product and system information management, CEVT expanded its PLM footprint to include Siemens Teamcenter Product Configurator software as the next step in their digital product definition journey. The configurator serves as the single authoritative source for all variant logic across CEVT's car platforms, enabling engineers to plan and manage the introduction and availability of features in a structured, integrated way. Rather than a clean-slate deployment, the rollout extended existing Teamcenter infrastructure — preserving prior investments while layering configuration management capabilities on top. Siemens supported rapid adaptation of the system to meet evolving business requirements as CEVT's platform scope expanded.

CEVT established a reliable, organization-wide single source of truth for product configuration data, eliminating the fragmentation that previously slowed cross-functional engineering work. Key outcomes include:

• Centralized variant control across rapidly expanding car platforms, replacing disconnected data silos
• Faster system adaptation — the configurator was designed to be updated quickly as business needs evolved, reducing the lag between strategic decisions and engineering execution
• Improved reuse of common components across variants, a core requirement for CEVT's modular development strategy

The investment also positioned CEVT for continued PLM capability growth rather than a one-time fix.

• Automotive R&D organizations pursuing modular platforms need configuration management in place before variant complexity outpaces manual tracking — not after.
• Extending an existing PLM system (rather than introducing a separate tool) reduces integration risk and accelerates adoption across engineering teams.
• A product configurator's value compounds over time: each new platform variant added to the system increases the ROI of centralized control.
• Rapid adaptability of the configuration system to changing business rules is as important as initial setup — lock-in to rigid logic creates its own debt.
• Treating configuration data as a first-class engineering asset, governed with the same rigor as CAD or BOM data, is the foundation for scalable multi-platform development.