Variant configuration is used for manufacturing complex products where customers can determine product features. The goal is to quickly react to customer requirements without creating separate materials for each variant. Variant configuration offers an opportunity to restructure product structures and define new processes that impact areas like marketing and product data management. It helps simplify manufacturing of products with many variations and varieties of input materials. Variant configuration uses characteristics, classes, and dependencies to configure products and link them to the correct BOM and pricing. The document provides steps for setting up variant configuration including creating characteristics, classes, configuration profiles, dependencies, pricing rules, and linking it all to a sales process.