Component Flexibility with Inheritance in an Assembly

Hi All

I am currently using Creo 3.0 with Windchill. I have a component that is a base component with a suppressed feature that ultimately gets resumed at an assembly level operation. My target component uses external inheritance from the base component at which point secondary operations are added for branding purposes. When I use the target part in the next level up I am not able to make features in the inheritance tree flexible. Any features added after the inheritance tree or the inheritance feature itself can be made flexible but the flexibility does not seem to extend to features in an inheritance tree.

Family tables could be used but during the development phase, it is not ideal to revise a production released family table to add a variant that may or may not be used.

Another option would be to add the suppressed feature to the target model directly or with a UDF but I am trying to avoid that.

Any suggestions would help

Thanks

Brett