How do you design a modular product architecture and manage variants in CAD/PLM systems?

Modular architecture design involves: identifying functional modules with defined interfaces, creating module variants that share interface specifications, establishing a product structure with configurable modules, implementing variant rules and constraints in PLM, using CAD configurations or family tables for module variants, creating 150% BOM containing all possible components, and defining variant effectivity for production planning. PLM systems manage configuration through variant conditions, rules-based BOM generation, and change management scoped to affected variants. Design reviews must validate interface compatibility across variant combinations.