NDLI: An Introduction to Product Family Evaluation Graphs

Content Provider	The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Digital Collection
Author	Ye, Xiaoli John, K. Gershenson Khadke, Kiran Lai, Xiaoxia Guo, Fang
Copyright Year	2005
Abstract	With increasingly aggressive competition for market share, manufacturing companies are facing the challenge of providing nearly customized products at bulk prices. To achieve this, product families — a group of related products derived from a single product platform — have been used to provide strategic variety to satisfy customer requirements and simultaneously achieve economies of scale. Many methods for product family design have been developed. However, we still lack the ability to evaluate a product family based on quantitative tradeoffs between product family commonality and product family variety. In this paper, we introduce the Product Family Evaluation Graph (PFEG), which can assist product family designers choosing the “best” product family design among a set of product family design options. This method is complete in its formulation, but lacking in tools for implementation. It is our purpose to show the usefulness of such a method and discuss its foundation. We show how the tool can be used to compare candidate product family designs and used in the robust design of a single product family. In addition, we highlight the strategic factors and measures that are the basis for evaluating any product family. We offer ten example strategic factors — customization, market life, technological innovation, family size, complexity, development time, service and maintenance, environmental impacts, manufacturing cost, and production volume — that determine the ideal tradeoff strategy between commonality and variety. We also highlight the need for more research into the validity of these factors, the specific relationships between these factors, and a tradeoff strategy. The measures of commonality are shown to be well established. However, we show that there is still a glaring need for the quantitative evaluation of product family variety. In summary, this paper is intended as a starting place, an opening set of questions, and as a framework for the general solution to the problem of a quantitative evaluation of product family design.
Sponsorship	Design Engineering Division and Computers and Information in Engineering Division
Starting Page	403
Ending Page	412
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	079184742X
DOI	10.1115/DETC2005-85229
e-ISBN	0791837661
Volume Number	Volume 5a: 17th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology
Conference Proceedings	ASME 2005 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
Language	English
Publisher Date	2005-09-24
Publisher Place	Long Beach, California, USA
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Commonality Product family Product family evaluation Product platform Variety Design Innovation Maintenance Manufacturing Tradeoffs
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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