Platform-Based Design and Development: Current Trends and Needs in Industry

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Tucker Marion ◽  
Olivier de Weck ◽  
Katja Ho¨ltta¨-Otto ◽  
Michael Kokkolaras ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Design Development ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Strategic Innovation ◽  
Future Work

Many companies constantly struggle to find cost-effective solutions to satisfy the diverse demands of their customers. In this paper, we report on two recent industry-focused conferences that emphasized platform design, development, and deployment as a means to increase variety, shorten lead-times, and reduce development and production costs. The first conference, Platform Management for Continued Growth, was held November–December 2004 in Atlanta, Georgia, and the second, 2005 Innovations in Product Development Conference — Product Families and Platforms: From Strategic Innovation to Implementation, was held in November 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two conferences featured presentations from academia and more than 20 companies who shared their successes and frustrations with platform design and deployment, platform-based product development, and product family planning. Our intent is to provide a summary of the common themes that we observed in these two conferences. Based on this discussion, we extrapolate upon industry’s needs in platform design, development, and deployment to stimulate and catalyze future work in this important area of research.

Product Platform Design and Optimization: Status and Promise

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Optimization Techniques ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Global Marketplace ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Design And Optimization

In an effort to improve customization for today’s highly competitive global marketplace, many companies are utilizing product families to increase variety, shorten lead-times, and reduce costs. The key to a successful product family is the product platform from which it is derived either by adding, removing, or substituting one or more modules to the platform or by scaling the platform in one or more dimensions to target specific market niches. This nascent field of engineering design research has matured rapidly in the past decade, and this paper provides an extensive review of the research activity that has occurred during that time to facilitate product platform design and optimization. Techniques for identifying platform leveraging strategies within a product family are reviewed along with optimization-based approaches to help automate the design of a product platform and its corresponding family of products. Examples from both industry and academia are presented throughout the paper to highlight the benefits of platform-based product development, and the paper concludes with a discussion of promising research directions to help bridge the gap between planning and managing families of products and designing and manufacturing them.

scholarly journals Product platform design and customization: Status and promise

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY W. SIMPSON
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Global Marketplace ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Product Platforms

In an effort to improve customization for today's highly competitive global marketplace, many companies are utilizing product families and platform-based product development to increase variety, shorten lead times, and reduce costs. The key to a successful product family is the product platform from which it is derived either by adding, removing, or substituting one or more modules to the platform or by scaling the platform in one or more dimensions to target specific market niches. This nascent field of engineering design has matured rapidly in the past decade, and this paper provides a comprehensive review of the flurry of research activity that has occurred during that time to facilitate product family design and platform-based product development for mass customization. Techniques for identifying platform leveraging strategies within a product family are reviewed along with metrics for assessing the effectiveness of product platforms and product families. Special emphasis is placed on optimization approaches and artificial intelligence techniques to assist in the process of product family design and platform-based product development. Web-based systems for product platform customization are also discussed. Examples from both industry and academia are presented throughout the paper to highlight the benefits of product families and product platforms. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential areas of research to help bridge the gap between planning and managing families of products and designing and manufacturing them.

Product Family and Product Platform Benchmarking With Commonality and Variety Indices

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Common Platform

As companies are pressured to reduce costs and lead-times while increasing variety, the need to design products based on common platform “elements” is growing. Product family design has become an effective strategy to meet this challenge, but companies still struggle with assessing how “good” their product family is. Companies routinely benchmark their individual products, but they struggle with how to benchmark their platforms and product families against their competitors. A novel approach for product family benchmarking is introduced in this paper integrating commonality and variety indices to compare competing product families and their platform “elements”. An example involving two families of men’s razors is presented to illustrate the approach. Limitations of the approach and future work are also discussed.

An Activity-Based Costing Method for Product Family Design in the Early Stages of Development

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaeil Park ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Cost Estimation ◽  
Production Cost ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Activity Based Costing ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Activity Costs

As the marketplace is changing so rapidly, it becomes a key issue for companies to best meet customers’ diverse demands by providing a variety of products in a cost-effective and timely manner. In the meantime, an increasing variety of capability and functionality of products has made it more difficult for companies that develop only one product at a time to maintain competitive production costs and reclaim market share. By designing a product family based on a robust product platform, overall production cost can be more competitive than competitors selling one product at a time while delivering highly differentiated products. In order to design cost-effective product families and product platforms, we are developing a production cost estimation framework in which relevant costs are collected, estimated, and analyzed. Since the framework is quite broad, this paper is dedicated to refining the estimation framework in a practical way by developing an activity-based costing (ABC) system in which activity costs are mapped to individual parts in the product family, which is called cost modularization, and the activity costs affected by product family design decisions are reconstructed to make the costs relevant to these decisions. A case study involving a family of power tools is used to demonstrate the proposed use of the ABC system.

A Tool to Integrate Design for Assembly During Product Platform Design

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amar Pandit ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Design For Assembly ◽  
Design And Development ◽  
Single Product ◽  
Entire Family ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Integrate Design

To survive in the current market, many companies are moving toward design and development of product families using a platform approach. To effectively develop a family of products, companies have to consider both component and assembly perspectives. The assembly perspective has many issues associated with it for developing common platforms, which includes assemblability evaluation for the entire family. Application of Design for Assembly techniques to evaluate product family will require modifications to the current single product DFA method. In this paper a product family DFA tool and guidelines are presented. The application of this product family DFA tool is illustrated using Walkman® and Coffeemaker product family.

A Product Dissection-Based Methodology to Benchmark Product Family Design Alternatives

2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri J. Thevenot ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Manufacturing Cost ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Potential Cost ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Design Alternatives

Today’s companies are pressured to develop platform-based product families to increase variety, while keeping production costs low. Determining why a platform works, and alternatively why it does not, is an important step in the successful implementation of product families and product platforms in any industry. Internal and competitive benchmarking is essential to obtain knowledge of how successful product families are implemented, thus avoiding potential pitfalls of a poor product platform design strategy. While the two fields of product family design and benchmarking have been growing rapidly lately, we have found few tools that combine the two for product family benchmarking. To address this emerging need, we introduce the product family benchmarking method (PFbenchmark) to assess product family design alternatives (PFDAs) based on commonality/variety tradeoff and cost analysis. The proposed method is based on product family dissection, and utilizes the Comprehensive Metric for Commonality developed in previous work to assess the level of commonality and variety in each PFDA, as well as the corresponding manufacturing cost. The method compares not only (1) existing PFDAs but also (2) the potential cost savings and commonality/variety improvement after redesign using two plots—the commonality/variety plot and the cost plot—enabling more effective comparisons across PFDAs. An example of benchmarking of two families of valves is presented to demonstrate the proposed method.

Low Volume Plastics Manufacturing Strategies

2007 ◽  
Vol 129 (12) ◽  
pp. 1225-1233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruchi Karania ◽  
David Kazmer
Keyword(s):  
Injection Molding ◽  
Product Development ◽  
Lead Time ◽  
Development Time ◽  
Numerical Control ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Total Production ◽  
Fused Deposition ◽  
Production Quantity

Plastic components are vital components of many engineered products, frequently representing 20–40% of the product value. While injection molding is the most common process for economically producing complex designs in large quantities, a large initial monetary investment and extended development time are required to develop appropriate tooling. For applications with lower or unknown production quantities, designers may prefer another process that has a lower development cost and lead time albeit with higher marginal costs and production times. A methodology is presented that assists the designer to select the most appropriate manufacturing process that trades off the total production costs with production lead times. The approach is to develop aggregate component cost and lead-time models as a function of production quantity from extensive industry data for an electrical enclosure consisting of two components. Binding quotes were secured from multiple suppliers for a variety of manufacturing processes including computer numerical control machining, fused deposition modeling, selective laser sintering, vacuum casting, direct fabrication, and injection molding with soft prototype and production tooling. The methodology yields a Pareto optimal set that compares the production costs and lead times as a function of the production quantity. The results indicate that the average cost per enclosure assembly is highly sensitive to the production quantity, with average costs varying by more than a factor of 100 for production quantities varying between 100 and 10,000 assemblies. Each of the processes is competitive with respect to total production cost and total production lead time under differing conditions; a flow chart is provided as an example of a decision support tool that can be provided to assist process selection during the product development process and thereby reduce the product development time and cost.

Design for Mass Customization by Developing Product Family Architecture

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell M. Tseng ◽  
Jianxin Jiao
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Mass Customization ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Customer Requirements ◽  
Market Positioning ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Integration Platform ◽  
Product Family Architecture ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

Abstract Mass customization is becoming an important agenda in industry and academia alike. This paper deals with mass customization from a product development perspective. A framework of design for mass customization (DFMC) by developing product family architecture (PFA) is presented. To deal with tradeoffs between diversity of customer requirements and reusability of design and process capabilities, DFMC advocates shifting product development from designing individual products to designing product families. As the core of DFMC, the concept of PFA is developed to assist different functional departments within a manufacturing enterprise to work together cohesively. A PFA describes variety and product families and performs as a generic product platform for product differentiation in which individual customer requirements can be satisfied through systematic decisions of developing product variants. Based on such a PFA, the DFMC framework provides a unifying integration platform for synchronizing market positioning, soliciting customer requirements, increasing reusability, and enhancing manufacturing scale of economy across the entire product realization process.

Concurrent Design of Product Families and Assembly Systems

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Bryan ◽  
S. J. Hu ◽  
Y. Koren
Keyword(s):  
System Design ◽  
Concurrent Engineering ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Assembly System ◽  
Concurrent Design ◽  
Assembly Systems ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Assembly System Design

In order to gain competitive advantage, manufacturers require cost effective methods for developing a variety of products within short time periods. Product families, reconfigurable assembly systems and concurrent engineering are frequently used to achieve this desired cost effective and rapid supply of product variety. The independent development of methodologies for product family design and assembly system design has led to a sequential approach to the design of product families and assembly systems. However, the designs of product families and assembly systems are interdependent and efficiencies can be gained through their concurrent design. There are no quantitative concurrent engineering techniques that address the problem of the concurrent design of product families and assembly systems. In this paper, a non-linear integer programming formulation for the concurrent design of a product family and assembly system is introduced. The problem is solved with a genetic algorithm. An example is used to demonstrate the advantage of the concurrent approach to product family and assembly system design over the existing sequential methodology.

Effective Product Family Design Using Preference Aggregation

2005 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 659-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihuang Dai ◽  
Michael J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Preference Aggregation ◽  
Optimization Approach ◽  
Product Families ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Effective Product

The development of product families, groups of products that share a common platform, is one way to provide product variety while keeping design and production costs low. The design of a product platform can be formulated as a multicriteria optimization problem in which the performances of individual products trade off against each other and against the objective of platform standardization. The problem is often solved in two stages: one to determine the values of the shared platform variables and a second to optimize the product family members with respect to specific targets. In the first stage, it is common to target the mean and variability of performance when fixing the values of platform variables. This paper contributes three new methods for platform development. The new methods are demonstrated on an electric motor example from the platform design literature, and the results are compared to those from existing methods. First, a preference aggregation method is applied to aggregate the multiple objectives into a single overall objective function. On the example problem, this approach gives superior results to existing techniques. Second, an alternative method that targets the minimum and maximum of the range of performance across the platform, instead of the mean and standard deviation, is proposed and shown to succeed where the existing method may fail. Third, a single-stage optimization approach which solves for both platform and nonplatform variables in a single pass is presented. This method delivers notably superior performance on the example problem but will, in general, incur greater computational expense.

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