Toward an Information Management Infrastructure for Product Family Planning and Mass Customization

Abstract

Complex new product development requires numerous decisions by many individuals and groups, which are often geographically and temporally distributed. There is a need to share and coordinate distributed resources and synchronize decisions, and recent advances in information technology (IT) pose an untapped potential for assisting in the capture, storage, retrieval and facilitated use of product development information. We exploit IT to address this problem through the proposed approach to Product Family Planning. By sharing assets such as components, processes and knowledge across a family of products, companies can efficiently develop differentiated products and increase the flexibility and responsiveness of their product realization process. In this paper we describe our recent efforts in realizing an information management infrastructure for product family planning and platform customization. In particular, we focus on three current research thrusts to identify product platform leveraging strategies to support future product family planning: (1) an evolutionary approach to product platforming, (2) a bottom-up approach to product platforming, and (3) industry-based platform case studies. Future research directions are also outlined.

Meeting Name

ASME 2004 Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (2004: Sep. 28-Oct. 2, Salt Lake City, UT)

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Design Repository; Information Technology; New Products; Product Development; Product Family; Product Platform; Software Agents; Intelligent agents (Computer software)

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2004 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2004

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