Addressing the impact of high levels of product variety on complexity in design and manufacture

Abstract

Management of complexity arising from high levels of product variety is a critical problem in the automotive and other industries. In the premium vehicle sector, this is particularly important with customer expectation of personalized products. The levels of resultant complexity in business operations, from product development to supply, lead to erosion in profitability and/or a higher price for the consumer. An integrated framework to analyse variety, complexity, and its associated costs to guide product development decisions is not well developed. This paper presents a high-level design for variety framework to inform decisions on variety and complexity, underpinned by cost and revenue analysis. The work potentially has much wider application than just in the premium vehicle sector.

Product complexity and operational performance: A systematic literature review

“…3.6.1 General manufacturing costs. There are numerous articles supporting the claim that increased PC leads to increased manufacturing and supply chain costs (Alford et al, 2000;Berman, 2011;Bozarth et al, 2009;Ding et al, 2007;Lanza et al, 2010;Mapes et al, 1997;Moreno and Terwiesch, 2017;Roy et al, 2011;Sardar and Lee, 2015;Silveira, 1998;Squire et al, 2006;Sun and Ding, 2010;Thonemann and Bradley, 2002;Wan and Dresner, 2015;Wong and Eyers, 2011;Zhang and Tseng, 2007). Most of these studies suggest a linear relationship between the number of finished products or product families produced and operations costs.…”

“…The number of components or the number of options for a specific component (e.g., layers on a computer chip, options for auxiliary parts, number of component configurations, packaging type) (Bozarth et al, 2009;Brun and Pero, 2012;Closs et al, 2010;Er and MacCarthy, 2006;Escobar-Saldívar et al, 2008;Holweg, 2005;Hsieh and Tong, 2006;Huang and Inman, 2010;Inman and Blumenfeld, 2014;Kadakia et al, 1994;Keil et al, 2014;Roy et al, 2011;Sardar and Lee, 2015;Shah et al, 2017;Zhang and Tseng, 2007) 15…”

“…packaging, inventory holding, distribution. logistics) (Ding et al, 2007;Roy et al, 2011;Wan, 2016;Wan and Dresner, 2015) Direct manufacturing costs (survey)…”

The impact of Additive Manufacturing on the product-process matrix

“…Vuuren 2003). However, offering variety traditionally introduces penalties including increased manufacturing costs and complexity (Roy et al 2010), degraded delivery speed and accuracy (Mapes, New, and Szwejczewski 1997), impaired forecasting capabilities (Wan and Sanders 2017), and diminished overall manufacturing performance (Zipkin 1995;Wan, Evers, and Dresner 2012).…”

Improving Product Quality through Functional Analysis Approach: Case of Dual Axis Solar Tracker

“…This approach considers a linear relationship of functions at each level, but the number of assemblies and components in a device are neglected. Roy et al (2010)'s complexity metric method was formulated to address the demand of the device with regard to the commonality of components used to construct the device [10]. Whereby product commonality is the number of parts being used for more than one product and is measured for all product family.…”