Increasing commonalities by designing production-oriented modular product platforms

摘要

Companies producing in high-wage countries are increasingly challenged due to the necessary differentiation and cost pressure. The modular product platform approach is more and more used by these companies for structuring their product range in order to realise and deploy commonalities. This type of product architecture enables companies to produce nearly individual products without losing economies of scale across the product range. Economies of scale due to communalities result in decreased process costs, reduced development lead-time by uncoupling the development of modules and products as well as the augmentation of the technical product robustness. However, the design of modular product platforms itself causes new challenges regarding the product structuring, the process and organizational design. Recent approaches for the development of communalities through modular product platforms are focusing only the product itself. Since costs are mainly determined in the development phase but caused later in the production phase both product and production have to be taken into account. Furthermore, modular product platforms have a higher variety and diversity of elements since they represent the components, modules and functions of the entire product program. This paradigm shift from an integral product design to a modular product structure cannot be controlled with existing models and methods. Our paper confirms commonality has to be optimized by focusing both the product and production. Therefore we have designed a descriptive framework (commonality model) to display and optimize the commonality both in the product and the process. Furthermore, a product architecture development process that is superior to the individual product development processes was developed for the systematic design of commonalities. The approach presented in this paper focusses on the interactions between product and process parameters. In our approach these interactions will first be displayed based on the graph theory and then be optimized applying sensitivity analysis. By varying relevant parameters both on the product and process side constitutive features can be derived determining product and process standards in order to enhance the overall commonality level.