Value chain and stakeholder‐driven product platform design

Abstract

Product platform design and development is an arduous process that involves multiple stakeholders both inside and outside of a company. However, owing to its benefits, product platform has been widely implemented in the industry. Although numerous methodologies for product platform option generation, selection, and optimization have been proposed and demonstrated through various case studies, only a few researchers have explored and demonstrated a product platform design process that considered various value chain impacts. Herein, a value chain and stakeholderdriven product platform design process is introduced. The process is demonstrated through a case study, where different water purifier product platform options were generated and evaluated for their effects on value chain, such as organization structure, production line configuration, economic effect, and preferences of different stakeholders. K E Y W O R D SProduct Platform, Quality Function Deployment, Value Chain Analysis, Water Purifier 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sys Systems Engineering. 2020;23:312-326.

A conceptual framework of quality cost chain in strategic cost management

“…The value chain complexity of each company is different (Ames et al, 2013;Bhargava et al, 2018;Choi et al, 2020;Janatyan and Shahin, 2020;Yilmaz and Bititci, 2006). The root cause of external failures experienced by e-retailers and customers can be purely from the delivery process in the service activity (Johnson and Whang, 2009;Tsai et al, 2013), it can also come from the carelessness of the packaging department in the outbound logistics (Tsai et al, 2013).…”

“…Quality is a multi-dimensional concept (Feigenbaum, 1983;Lakhal, 2009;Zeng et al, 2015). Quality can relate to performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, or perceived product quality from a customer perspective (Ames et al, 2013;Choi et al, 2020;Pekanov Starcevic et al, 2015;Feigenbaum, 1983;Lakhal, 2009;Prajogo et al, 2008;Purushothama, 2012). A quality problem arises when the customer feels one of their needs is unfulfilled by the product.…”

“…The red cells show the chains at which the activities-related quality cost is usually applied. In a deeper analysis, the yellow cells may have a strong relationship with the given quality costs (Table 2) (Blocher et al, 2019;Choi et al, 2020;Dapiran and Kam, 2017;Farooq et al, 2017;Honarpour et al, 2018;Purushothama, 2012;Soares et al, 2020;Wood, 2013;Zeng et al, 2015). Many research shows that an information system (IS) can be an infrastructure that supports all quality-related activities (Guimaraes et al, 2007;Johnson and Whang, 2009;Kagermann et al, 2015;Lin, 1991;Sahut et al, 2020;Zhang, 2005).…”

“…As a result, when nonconformities arise, quality is viewed as a partial problem and workers are not considered seriously as a contributing factor. Regardless of the neglect of engineering principles, violations of standard operating procedures, or the continuation of a sub-optimal process on these non-conformity problems, the fact is that there are various issues related to the ineffectiveness of workers behind it (Choi et al, 2020;Schmitt, 2018). In the context of the value chain, employee empowerment means involving employees in every activity in each chain (Keller et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2020;Nikulin et al, 2021).…”

The use of process benchmarking in the water industry to introduce changes in the digitization of the company’s value chain

“…This is done by utilizing the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) and Value Chain Analysis (VCA) to fix the cost and price of potable water (Al-Hashimi & Jabbar, 2019). An equally interesting example of the use of value chain analysis is provided by the team of researchers, Choi et al (2020). In their document, they presented the value chain and the stakeholder-oriented, product platform design process.…”