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

Author

Gurneet Kaur Virdi

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 extent 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, page iv.

Advisor(s)

Allada, Venkat

Committee Member(s)

Liou, Frank W.
Ramakrishnan, Sreeram

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Manufacturing Engineering

Publisher

University of Missouri--Rolla

Publication Date

Fall 2005

Journal article titles appearing in thesis/dissertation

• Managing Product Families: Conceptual and Structural Architecture Reusability and Implications

Pagination

ix, 112 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 54-57).

Rights

© 2005 Gurneet Kaur Virdi, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

New productsProduct management

Thesis Number

T 8890

Print OCLC #

71656917

Recommended Citation

Virdi, Gurneet Kaur, "Managing product families: Conceptual and structural architecture reusability/commonality and resource change implications" (2005). Masters Theses. 5844.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/masters_theses/5844