Platform Concepts for the Systems Business Design and Development of Global Product Platforms

摘要

Increasing globalization pressures are making systems business companies follow the path taken by the automotive industry and develop global platform products. By doing so these companies are now facing the difficult task of defining a platform concept, which meets different local user and market requirements as well as standards, laws, and regulations. In addition big variations in price and cost targets, the education of work forces, and the availability of production technology have an impact on local value chains and product life cycle requirements. Thus the challenges with the creation of global platforms are to identify commonalities and differences in product and product life cycle requirements early and ensure the optimal collaboration in the worldwide distributed development team. By analyzing the global platform approach of Schindler Elevator Ltd and four additional companies, this research suggests a new methodology for global platform development, called platform process. The benefit of this systematic platform process lies in its structure and proposal of new methods, which allow incorporating the critical dimensions of market, product, global execution, and life cycle/value chain in the platform development. The Global Product Structure Matrix method helps to find the ideal market and product variety. The Variant Indication Analysis method assesses a planned platform regarding its conformity with the local value chain and product life cycle requirements. Further the global execution of the platform development in globally dispersed development teams is supported by the Component Box method, which offers the necessary definitions and helps build a common understanding for platforms. The platform process was implemented at Schindler and helped developing a new global platform. First results showed that product variety and time to market were reduced, and commonalities and local differences in product and product life cycle requirements were identified early. Further the platform process and its methods supported collaboration and simultaneous engineering in Schindler's globally dispersed development team. Hence, this research offers a straight forward platform development process targeted at practitioners.