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.

A Method for Benchmarking Product Family Design Alternatives

2007 ◽  
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 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 two families of valves is presented to demonstrate the proposed method.

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.

Two Methodologies for Identifying Product Platform Elements Within an Existing Set of Products

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth D. Steva ◽  
Elizabeth N. Rice ◽  
Tucker J. Marion ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Robert B. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Design Structure ◽  
Development Costs ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Single Use

As companies are pressured to decrease product development costs concurrently with increasing product variety, the need to develop products based upon common components and platforms is growing. Determining why a platform worked, or alternatively why it did not, is an important step in the successful implementation of product families and product platforms in any industry. Unfortunately, published literature on platform identification and product family analysis using product dissection and reverse engineering methods is surprisingly sparse. This paper introduces two platform identification methodologies that use different combinations of tools that can be readily applied based on information obtained directly from product dissection. The first methodology uses only the Bills-of-Materials and Design Structure Matrices while the second utilizes function diagrams, Function-Component Matrices, Product-Vector Matrices, and Design Structure Matrices to perform a more in-depth analysis of the set of products. Both methodologies are used to identify the platform elements in a set of five single-use cameras available in the market. The proposed methodologies identify the film advance and shutter actuation platform elements of the cameras, which include seven distinct components. The results are discussed in detail along with limitations of these two methodologies.

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.

Attribute Attribute-Based Clustering for Product Family Design

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoli Ye ◽  
John K. Gershenson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
New Product ◽  
Design Tool ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Attributes ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Qualitative Design ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Target Values ◽  
The Ideal

As manufacturers are forced by today’s marketplace to provide nearly customized products to satisfy individual customer requirements and simultaneously achieve economies of scale during production, product family design and platform-based product development have garnered their attention. Determining which elements (attributes, functions, components, etc.) should be made common, variable, or unique, across a product family is the critical step in the successful implementation of product families and product platforms. Therefore, the inherent challenge in product family design is to balance the tradeoff between product commonality (how well the components and functions can be reused across a product family) and variety (the range of different products in a product family). There are opportunities to develop tools to directly aid in addressing the commonality/variety tradeoff at the product family planning stage in a way that supports the engineering design process. In this paper, we develop a matrix-based, qualitative design tool – the Attribute-Based Clustering Methodology (ABCM) that enables the design of product families to better satisfy the ideal commonality/variety tradeoff as determined by a company’s competitive focus. The ABCM is used to identify component commonality opportunities in product families without sacrificing product variety by analyzing product attributes across the product family. This paper focuses on the ABCM as used in new product family design and how the ABCM can be used to cluster product attributes into potential modules and product platforms. It is intended as a starting place, an opening set of questions, and as a framework for the general solution to the problem of a qualitative design tool for product family design that directly address the commonality/variety tradeoff. Development of the ABCM starts with the classification of existing product attributes into three categories: common, unique, and variable. The attributes are then clustered into platforms and differentiating modules based on their occurrences, target value ranges (partitioning the target values for each product attribute into achievable ranges), and the manner in which the range changes across the entire target market segments. The ABCM can be used as a qualitative guideline in product family design. In new product family design, it can be used to identify which elements (functions and components) should be clustered into a common platform and which should be clustered into differentiating modules based on an analysis of the product attributes, their occurrences, and their target values across the product family. In product family redesign, the ABCM can be used to identify any elements that are inappropriately included in a platform or inappropriately clustered into differentiating modules by comparing the ideal clustering with the actual clustering.

Optimal Kinematics Design of an Industrial Robot Family

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan O¨lvander ◽  
Xiaolong Feng ◽  
Bo Holmgren
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Industrial Robots ◽  
Mathematical Framework ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
The Common ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Common Platform

Product family design is a well recognized method to address the demands of mass customization. A potential drawback of product families is that the performance of individual members are reduced due to the constraints added by the common platform, i.e. parts and components need to be shared by other family members. This paper presents a formal mathematical framework where the product family design problem is stated as an optimization problem and where optimization is used to find an optimal product family. The object of study is kinematics design of a family of industrial robots. The robot is a serial manipulator where different robots share arms from a common platform. The objective is to show the trade-off between the size of the common platform and the kinematics performance of the robot.

Strategic Decisions in the Early Stages of Product Family Design

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. A. Maier ◽  
Georges M. Fadel
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
Product Introduction ◽  
Single Product ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Formal Design

Abstract The realization that designing products in families can and does have significant technological and economic advantages over traditional single product design has motivated increasing interest in recent years in formal design tools and methodologies for product family design. However, currently there is no guidance for designers in the first key strategic decisions of product family design, in particular determining the type of product family to design. Hence in this paper, first a taxonomy of different types of product families is presented which consists of seven types of product families, categorized based on number of products and time of product introduction. Next a methodology is introduced to aid designers in determining which type of product family is appropriate, based upon early knowledge about the nature of the intended product(s) and their intended market(s). From this information it also follows both which manufacturing paradigm and which fundamental design strategies are appropriate for the product family. Finally the proposed methodology is illustrated through a case study examining a family of whitewater kayaks.

A Framework for Ontology-Based Heterogeneous Data Integration for Cost Management in Product Family Design

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaomeng Chang ◽  
Janis Terpenny
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Heterogeneous Data ◽  
Schema Integration ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Related Factors ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Heterogeneous Data Integration ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Semantic Data ◽  
Data Schema

High quality, high impact and economical products and systems are important goals for an enterprise. The usage of product families can be strategic to achieving these goals, yet defining these families can be challenging, requiring the consideration of numerous cost factors. This requires bringing together a great number of heterogeneous data sources of varying formats in a manner that allows the product development team to easily locate and reuse information in a collaborative manner across time and space. To date, our work has focused on the development and use of an Activity-Based Cost ontology (ABC ontology) to guide designers drill down to get at information for product family design. However, this ontology is built in such a way that it can only support information retrieval from the ontology and does not bring together and connect heterogeneous data resources. It does not address the problem of designers who struggle with obtaining relevant details from different departments in an enterprise. While there have been several semantic data schema integration tools for heterogeneous data resources integration, these tools cannot guide users to related information, that would lead to the root cause of the high cost. In this paper, in order to better manage cost in product family design, an ontology-based framework is put forward that builds on our prior work and combines the advantages of ABC ontology and data schema integration tools. The ontology-based framework can guide users to the proper information aspects through querying the central ontology, and give users detailed information about these aspects from heterogeneous data resources with the support of local ontologies. Ultimately, this framework will facilitate designers with better utilization of cost-related factors for product family design from a whole enterprise perspective.

Allocative efficiency, potential cost savings, and power supply price markdown in Korean electric power sector

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myunghun Lee
Keyword(s):  
Electric Power ◽  
Power Supply ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Allocative Efficiency ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
Electric Power Industry ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Potential Cost ◽  
Owned Company ◽  
Supply Price

As one publicly owned company monopolizes the electricity supply, Korea’s power market has been distorted. Firms faced with constraints imposed by a regulatory environment are likely to fail to minimize their production costs subject to market prices. In this paper, we test for allocative efficiency of fuel inputs for the Korean electric power industry over the period of 1990–2015. The potential cost savings and maximum power supply price markdown are calculated by imposing allocative efficiency. The power plants, on average, could have reduced their fuel costs by as much as 22.1% annually. The attainment of allocative efficiency would have enabled the power supply price to be cut by 7.6% annually.

Introduction of a Product Family Penalty Function Using Physical Programming

2002 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Achille Messac ◽  
Michael P. Martinez ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Penalty Function ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Physical Programming ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Scaling Parameters ◽  
The Common ◽  
Selection Of

In an effort to increase customization for today’s highly competitive global markets, many companies are looking to product families to increase product variety and shorten product lead-times while reducing costs. The key to a successful product family is the common product platform around which the product family is derived. Building on our previous work in product family design, we introduce a product family penalty function (PFPF) in this paper to aid in the selection of common and scaling parameters for families of products derived from scalable product platforms. The implementation of the PFPF utilizes the powerful physical programming paradigm to formulate the problem in terms of physically meaningful parameters. To demonstrate the proposed approach, a family of electric motors is developed and compared against previous results. We find that the PFPF enables us to properly balance commonality and performance within the product family through the judicious selection of the common parameters that constitute the product platform and the scaling parameters used to instantiate the product family.

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