Deciding on the total number of product architectures

Self Cite

Emerging research within the field of personalised medicines has aimed to enhance patient treatment through the use of pharmaceutical products that are customised to the individual needs and preferences of the patient. The currently dominant production platforms of pharmaceutical products, however, regard a mass production paradigm and are thus unfeasible for the production and provision of personalised medicines. The production platforms are not designed or are intended for a customisation context. Operating such a context with the current supply chain entails challenges such as increasing costs, time to patient and efforts in quality assurance activities. To address these challenges, this paper presents four reconfigured pharmaceutical supply chain designs. A qualitative operational performance assessment elicits the strengths and weaknesses of the respective supply chain design operating in a customisation context. The results suggest that a later point of variegation, that is, the point in the supply chain where the final customisation is achieved, can relieve the operational effort of the stakeholders in the supply chain while providing the benefits of personalised medicines, that is, an enhanced treatment outcome of the patient. A trade-off remains, however, between the supply chain’s decreased operational effort and degree of necessary reconfigurations, such as introducing new functions to stakeholder operation, reallocating activities to other stakeholders or educating stakeholders.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adapting discrete goods supply chains to support mass customisation of pharmaceutical products

Siiskonen

Mortensen

Malmqvist

et al. 2021

Self Cite

“…We use the definition of modularity given by Askhøj and Mortensen (2019), which is based on what Sanchez (2010) called strategic modularity. Modularity is “a one-to-one mapping of a function that is perceived by the customer to be an important source of differentiation onto a single component or subsystem of a component (Sanchez, 2010).…”

Section: Background and Research Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross domain modularization tool: Mechanics, electronics, and software

Askhøj

Christensen

Mortensen

2021

Self Cite

Modularization is a strategy used for handling the demand for external complexity with less internal complexity, which leads to higher profits and more efficient product development processes. However, modularity is often driven in silos, not crossing into the engineering fields of mechanics, electronics, and software. Therefore, we present the MESA (Mechanics, Electronics, and Software Architecture) tool—a tool that can be used to visualize modular product architectures across mechanics, electronics, and software. The tool demonstrates how a change in one domain affects the rest and how well aligned the modularity in the different domains is. The tool has been tested in two case companies that were used for case application and has helped provide information for making key design decisions in the development of new product families.

“…Bonev et al (2013) established the product requirement development model for reflecting customer needs to multi-layered architectures by combining PFMP with matrix-based methods. Then, Askhøj and Mortensen (2020) developed a method for reducing the number of product architectures managed in a company. Recently, Askhøj et al (2021) developed a modularization tool for visualizing cross-domain relationships among mechanics, electronics, and software domains, and Myrodia et al (2021) extensively reviewed variety-induced complexity cost factors and evaluated the usefulness of each factor in the case study.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variation architecture for reducing unnecessary variants in modular product family design by domain mapping and variant-level planning

Lim

Hong

2022

One of the major challenges in variety management of modular product families is to prevent continuously generated variants of design elements. This paper aims to provide guidance on how manufacturing companies can reduce a large number of variants that have already increased from the existing product architectures. This paper introduces a new concept of architecture named variation architecture ( VA) in which relationships between variants in the market, design, and production domains are arranged explicitly for planning variety of a modular product family. Since the VA includes two perspectives which are domain mapping and variant-level planning, it can help companies to systematically establish complex relationships between variants across the domains. This paper describes elements of the three domains, relationship types between elements, and four categories of relationship rules called management rules at the variant-level planning. A framework is proposed for reducing variants through the VA to demonstrate its applicability. In the case study, we apply the framework to a front chassis family having a large number of variants and show that the VA significantly reduces unnecessary variants compared to the currently being produced.