In
today’s highly competitive global marketplace, companies need
cost-effective solutions that satisfy diverse customer demands in
order to survive. To maintain their competitiveness, more and more
companies are turning to product platforms and families of products
to increase product variety, shorten lead times, and reduce their
development and manufacturing costs. Yet a significant gap exists
between strategies for planning and managing families of products and
methods for designing and manufacturing them.
This research
has created novel methods for generating product platform
alternatives and their corresponding families of products and
modeling the associated costs, demand and uncertainties of the
individual products. These methods support both top-down approaches
to platform planning as well as bottom-up approaches for redesigning
sets of products to improve commonality and increase economies of
scale and scope within the product line. Such methods are essential
to help resolve the inherent tradeoff between platform commonality
and individual product distinctiveness within the product family. The
work is being tested through industrial partnerships with Whirlpool,
Robert Bosch Corporation, Dana Corporation, Unique Mixers, Innovation
Factory, Durametal, Ivalo Lighting, and Flowserve Corporation.
To
promote these concepts to the larger community, a new textbook has
been written and Special Sessions on Product Family and Product
Platform Design have been held annually at the ASME Design
Engineering Technical Conferences since 2001. Two-day workshops on
platform family design have been developed and taught to practicing
engineers and managers at LG Electronics (in South Korea) and Zühlke
Engineering (in Switzerland). The invited lectures have been given
to a various companies including Intel, DuPont, Hyundai, and United
Technologies. Educational activities to enhance graduate level
product family design courses have also been created.
Industrial
partners: Whirlpool, Robert Bosch Corporation, Dana Corporation,
Unique Mixers, Innovation Factory, Durametal, Ivalo Lighting,
Flowserve Corporation
