Product family design and platform-based product development have attracted much attention from academia and industry alike in the past decade. While the underlying drivers for providing variety at low cost have been well established, marketplace globalisation is transforming the way that many companies design, develop, and deploy new products. Many companies must now consider a wider range of customer needs than ever before. Off-shore manufacturing has reduced labour and tooling costs to such a small percentage of total development costs that many companies can produce a profitable variety of products without having to share physical components or relying on a product platform.
Product platforming for a global marketplace has emerged as an important strategy for companies to better leverage capabilities and resources worldwide. Product realisation in turn becomes globally distributed and necessitates collaboration transcending national boundaries. Build-to-order and reconfiguration have become common norms. The traditional spectrum of product fulfilment therefore must be expanded to more than just manufacturing, and must now encompass marketing, design, production, and the supply and value chains, while also aligning with the self-adaptability of a learning organisation. We can envision that the horizon of product platforming should be shifted from a physical product perspective to a total life cycle experience. Product creation should be more than just dealing with pieces of hardware, but rather should be considered as the co-design of an entire ‘ecosystem’, including fulfilment, services, experiences, and human satisfaction at the individual as well as at the community levels.
This special issue is dedicated to highlighting recent advances in platform-based product development that are occurring in response to the globalisation of the marketplace and steady rise of off-shore manufacturing. Based on thorough and strict peer reviews, a total of six papers were selected for publication from 18 submissions. These papers represent a snapshot of cutting-edge research, disseminating recent developments in the field of product platforming for a global marketplace.
The paper by Gunzenhauser and Bongulielmi, ‘A Value Chain Oriented Approach for The Development of Global Platforms in The Systems Business’, provides evidence and insights into Schindler Elevators Ltd during their development of a new global product family. The paper discusses a generic platform development process adaptive for the conditions of the systems and project business. The platforming process is supported by a matrix-based method, called variant indication analysis, and manages to incorporate regionally varying product life cycles and value chain requirements into the global platform. This process is further supported by a component box platform model offering robustness for component reuse and flexibility for local differentiation. The case study reveals that the global platform facilitates the collaborative product development by offering enhanced transparency throughout the entire process.
Stone, Kurtadikar, Villanueva, and Bryant Arnold, in their paper, ‘A Customer Needs Motivated Conceptual Design Methodology for Product Portfolio Planning’, observe the importance of platform definition with respect to customer needs in modern product development, particularly in the context of global markets that demand customised or region-specific differentiation of products. Their research explores the utility of high-level customer needs as a direct means to define the product's base platform and differentiating modules. Their approach outlines platform and differentiating modules during the conceptual design stage of product development and plans a product portfolio before embodiment design occurs. Modern design tools such as functional modelling and modular heuristics are employed in their approach. Based on empirical studies, a customer need-motivated conceptual design method for product portfolio planning is developed. The paper demonstrates the application of the product portfolio planning method for a new product to generate conceptual designs of product variants.
The paper by Park, Shin, Insun, and Hyemia, ‘A Product Platform Concept Development Method’, illustrates by means of an electric razor example how the quality function deployment (QFD) method is applied to examine technical requirements across the major market segments serviced by a company's product lines and to aid in developing the modular product platform concept, as well as in improving an understanding of product family design. This method comprises three steps. The first step is to identify platform technical requirements from QFD by classifying technical requirements into either constant or variant technical requirements. The second step is to construct the platform planning chart, which is to identify the relationship between basic components and technical requirements and calculate degree of variety of components. Finally, the platform concept is explored using the design structure matrix with a degree of variety measure.
Focusing on electro-mechanical product design, Gupta and Okudan, in their paper, ‘Computer-Aided Generation of Modularised Conceptual Designs with Assembly and Variety Considerations’, investigate the limitations of existing design tools in assisting designers at the conceptual design stage. Using a case example of electronic toothbrush design, the paper presents a computerised conceptual design framework incorporating modularity, design for assembly, and design for variety principles. Modular design concepts are evaluated based on a criterion of the minimum assembly time, and how to satisfy future changes in customer needs by replacing certain modules only.
Lewis and Dolan's paper, ‘Robust Product Family Consolidation and Selection’, emphasises the issue of consolidating an existing product family. They extend their previous hypothetical equivalents and inequivalents method (HEIM) to the selection of an optimal product family configuration. In this extended HEIM, the optimisation problem's constraints are formulated using two different value functions, and common solutions are identified in order to select an optimal family of staplers. The result is benchmarked with a multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT)-based approach. The findings suggest that MAUT can be used to provide a necessary first step for product family consolidation and selection, and subsequently HEIM can be used to achieve a robust solution for a product family.
The paper by Ye and Gershenson, ‘Attribute-Based Clustering Methodology for Product Family Design’, examines the tradeoff between commonality and variety. To determine appropriate commonality and variety during product family design, while accounting for market/strategy drivers and engineering needs, an attribute-based clustering methodology (ABCM) is proposed to provide qualitative guidelines. The ABCM performs as a matrix-based design tool and clusters the product attributes of product family into a platform and its associated differentiating modules. Specifications and occurrences of product attribute across different market segments are used to partition a product's specification into ranges based upon the solutions used to achieve them. A family of single-use cameras is used to show how ABCM can address the commonality–variety tradeoff when considering market and engineering constraints in the early stages of design.
Product platforming for a global marketplace has emerged as a field that offers numerous opportunities for scholarly inquiry. Despite the diligent efforts of many scholars, considerably more research still needs to occur. As the papers collected here indicate, the unanswered questions may be examined from a wide variety of perspectives, theoretically as well as methodologically. It is our hope that the papers and themes presented in this special issue will spur more study to boost this important and flourishing area of research.
Finally, we would like to thank all the authors for the time and effort in contributing their papers to this special issue and for incorporating the referees’ comments when revising their manuscripts. Each paper accepted in this special issue was evaluated by at least three independent reviewers in two rounds, in addition to review by the guest editors. We are especially grateful to the referees who generously gave their time to evaluate the submitted manuscripts. Last, but not least, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Professor Alex Duffy, Editor-in-Chief, for reserving pages and scheduling a special issue, and for his advice, patience, and support during the process of collating this special issue.
Henri J. Thevenot
General Electric Transportation, USA
Timothy W. Simpson
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Roger J. Jiao
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Patrick Kenger
Dalarna University, Sweden