An integrated approach to product family redesign using commonality and variety metrics

Abstract

Redesigning a product family entails carefully balancing the trade-offs between commonality and differentiation that are governed by the underlying platform architecture. Numerous metrics for commonality and variety exist to support product family and product platform design; however, rarely are they used in concert to help redesign platforms and families of products effectively. In this paper, we introduce an integrated approach that uses multiple product family metrics to establish an effective platform redesign strategy. Specifically, we present a detailed procedure to integrate the generational variety index, product line commonality index, and design structure matrix to prioritize components for redesign based on variety and commonality needs in a family of products. While all three of these tools exist in the literature and have been used extensively to support product family design, the novelty in our work lies in their integration to establish a redesign strategy for platform architectures that achieves a better balance between the commonality and variety within a product family. To demonstrate the proposed approach, case studies involving two generations of wireless computer mice and two families of dishwashers are presented. Ongoing and future work is also discussed.

Design method validation – an investigation of the current practice in design research

“…Baylis, Zhang, and McAdams (2018) aim for finding a trade-off between commonality and quality of modular architecture, whereas Pakkanen, Juuti, and Lehtonen (2016) evaluate their method by costs. Jung and Simpson (2016) especially develop metrics to measure the modularity and sparsity to investigate connectivity in the platform architecture, and Koh et al (2015) build on a metric that is part of a design method developed in earlier work to support the prioritisation of component modularisation. All four contributions try to quantify the characteristics of modular product structures by operationalising them through metrics.…”

Value analysis for customizable modular product platforms: theory and case study

“…Stated preferences highlight the most appreciated features of a product, which are translated into requirements thanks to the House of quality matrix. The use of House of quality matrices and indices not only applies to the initial design of a product, but is also relevant for its redesign (Jung and Simpson 2016).…”

Identifying modularity practices across mechanics, electronics and software

“…Modular product architectures offers a strategy to cope with increasing complexity and make more profitable products (M. H. Meyer & Utterback, 1993;Robertson & Ulrich, 1998;Sanchez & Collins, 2001). In recent years, several scholars have developed methods and frameworks supporting engineers in developing modular product architectures (de Weck, 2006;Harlou, 2006;Jung & Simpson, 2016;Krause et al, 2014;Otto et al, 2016). The methods have been used on both mechanical and mechatronic products.…”