Masters Theses

Title

Managing product families: conceptual and structural architecture reusability/commonality and resource change

Alternative Title

Managing product families: conceptual and structural architecture reusability commonality and resource change
Managing product families: conceptual and structural architecture reusability and implications

Keywords and Phrases

Product family; Commonality indices

Abstract

"Many companies strive to strike the right balance between the level of customization and the degree of commonality between product variants. The rapid change in technologies and customer preferences renders the issue of customization vs. commonality a pivotal problem to strategically managing evolving product families and achieving economies of scale. Platform formation is seen as the key means to increase structural commonality. To date, most commonality indices have been reported at the structural level. Considerations to compute similar indices at the conceptual level of the product architecture have not yet been undertaken. We argue that it is essential to determine indices estimating the extend of architectural reuse and commonality at two levels of architecture design: concept design and detailed design. Product architectures are known to have profound impacts on company resources and hence it is therefore necessary to understand the implications of resource changes much before the detailed design is materialized. This work proposes a two step methodology to compute the reusability/commonality and the associated implication indices based on the global and detailed attributes of the conceptual and structural architectures. An illustrative example of a computer mouse family is used to demonstrate the working of the proposed methodology"--Abstract, leaf iv.

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Manufacturing Engineering

Publisher

University of Missouri--Rolla

Publication Date

Fall 2005

Pagination

ix, 112 leaves

Rights

© 2005 Gurneet Kaur Virdi, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Citation

File Type

text

Language

English

Library of Congress Subject Headings

New products
Product management

Thesis Number

T 8890

Print OCLC #

71656917

Link to Catalog Record

Full-text not available: Request this publication directly from Missouri S&T Library or contact your local library.

http://laurel.lso.missouri.edu/record=b5653317~S5

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