Product Properties
Product properties are used to describe related parameters associated with products, such as color, packaging, or shared recipes.
Product Characteristics
Within product properties are the product characteristics that the product property takes on. The property of Color may take on a characteristic of Red. In this way, characteristics are roughly equivalent to products.
Specification Variables
Also within product properties are the individual parameters that describe the attributes of the property. For example, within the property Color, Specification variables may be Color A Test, Color B Test, and so on. Specification variables are used to maintain recipe parameters and specifications that are plant-wide or not equipment specific. See Specification Properties Dialog Box and Building a Plant-Level Recipe or Specification.
How To Organize Properties and Characteristics
A good starting point for setting up properties and characteristics is to create a single property (such as "Global") and add a characteristic to this property for each distinct product the plant manufactures. This allows you to manage recipes/specifications at the plant level without having to think about hierarchy, or relationships between products that may not be understood at configuration time.
Taking this a step further may involve creating properties for each type of product and sub-product made. Having a property for Finished Products and a property for Formulas will allow you to separate finished product parameters from recipes and begin to allow for some hierarchy in the product structure. For example, 1000 finished products may be manufactured from 100 different formulas. Having these as separate properties allows you to manage 100 formulas one time as opposed to 100 formulas ten times across 1000 finished products.