Product platform concept development: Maturity and morphology based platform definition and decision analysis based risk assessment.

摘要

An increasingly global market environment and fierce competition have driven industries to explore platform based strategies in an attempt to reduce cost, achieve faster time-to-market and to capture wider segments of the market. However, the design of an efficient platform is a challenging process which requires technical and strategic understanding of a portfolio of products over multiple generations. Contributing to the challenges are the lack of information during early stages of the product development process, as well as the lack of a generic platform focused methodology suited for today's rapidly evolving business environment. To address these challenges, this dissertation presents: (1) the Morph-Maturity map as a platform strategy & platform priority decision making tool, (2) the Five-Step Design for Manufacture (DFM) process focused on identifying & improving platform solution elements, and (3) Decision Analysis (DA) tools as scorecarding and net present value evaluation techniques.;The key tools in the Five-Step process include, but not limited to, Variety Voice of Customer (VVOC) analysis and Design for Variety (DFV) chart. VVOC analysis extracts the range in customer requirements across spatial or generational market segments. The conventional Quality Function Deployment (QFD) House I and II convert the range into the variety indices of a product's solution elements. Combined with a project specific complexity metric, a DFV chart is created to improve the system level efficiency of a product while identifying the product's platform solution elements versus the variety enabling solution elements. Aligned with the platform strategy guided by the Morph-Maturity map, DA-based concept evaluation can suggest the best platform concept alternative by evaluating the net present values as the performance of merit of the platform concept developed through the Five-Step process.;The use of this framework allows companies to focus their strategic goals on a platform base that will serve spatial, global or/and generational portfolios of products for maximum market coverage, minimum development cost/resources, and shorter time-to-market. Because the actual implementation details of this framework may vary for different types of products, this dissertation presents a variety of industry case studies as an additional guide to framework application.