Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Product Variants Nightmare: Managing 5.8 x 10^21 Combinations!

16 Aug 2026 · 2 min

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1:31

In this excerpt, the speaker recounts a consulting engagement with an automobile manufacturer where they quantified the total number of valid product configurations—hardware, mechanical, software, and commercial options—to be about 5.8 × 10²¹. The sheer magnitude makes it impossible to pre‑define every possible variant. Consequently, large customers demand bespoke configurations, prompting the company to adopt a “clone‑a‑known” approach: they copy an existing, similar variant and tweak it for the client. This practice rapidly inflates the product catalog to thousands of near‑duplicate variants, creating significant challenges in locating a base model for new clones, maintaining consistency, and managing the overall variant ecosystem.

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You an idea of that, um, we worked with an automobile company and looked at, okay, how many ways could you combine all the options that were in that car, like the, the hardware, the, the mechanics, the, uh, the software, all the different options, even commercial options? So how many of those combinations are valid? It turned out there was 5.8 by 10 to the power of 21. Right? And that's not even the biggest that we've seen. So you think, so you think about that point of view, even if you come with thousands of product variants, it's not going to be enough, right? You're not going to cover all the different needs. So what, what, what happens is you are kind of forced to do it because your biggest customers are going to again demand, yeah, I, I need this in this way for my needs, right? And if you don't service my needs, I'll get someone who will. So you end up making new product variants based on these customers' requirements. So the tactic normally used is a clone-a-known tactic. I'll take an existing product variant that's kind of close, and I'll adapt that, and then I'll deliver that to the customer. So the net result of all of this is that you will have thousands of these product variants that are similar but not quite the same, with little pieces of difference between them. And then you're trying to manage all of that and maintain all of that. And then even just finding a starting point for the next clone alone becomes an issue, right?