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Fundamentals of product family architecture

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

1. Introduction
This research is motivated by an earlierendeavor towards investigating mass customization (Pine, 1993) from a productdevelopment perspective, namely DFMC(Tseng and Jiao, 1996). Essentially, theattempt is to include customers in the
product life-cycle, particularly in the designphase, through proactively connectingcustomer needs to the capabilities of acompany. The main emphasis is to elevatethe current practice of designing individualproducts to designing product families. Tosupport product customization, a PFA isneeded to characterize customer needs andsubsequently to fulfill these needs byconfiguring and modifying well-establishedmodules and components (termed as buildingblocks). In addition, a PFA performs as anintegration platform for extending thetraditional boundaries of product design toencompass a larger scope spanning fromsales and Marketing to distribution andservices.
In essence, a PFA defines the underlyingarchitecture of a firm's product platform,within which various product variants can
be derived from basic product designs tosatisfy a spectrum of customer needs relatedto various market niches. In other words, agood PFA provides a generic architecture tocapture and utilize commonality, within
which each new product is instantiated andextends so as to anchor future designs to acommon product line structure. In the
context of mass customization, the rationaleof a PFA resides with not only unburdening
the knowledge base from keeping variantforms of the same solution, but also withmodeling the design process of a class of
products that can widely variegate designsbased on individual customization
requirements within a coherent framework.Figure 1 illustrates the principle of PFA withrespect to DFMC.
2. Background review
2.1 Product architecture and modularity
Product architecture can be defined as theway in which the functional elements of aproduct are arranged into physical units andthe way in which these units interact (Ulrichand Eppinger, 1995). It is quite obvious thatall products have some kind of architecture,even if it is not necessarily has been
considered during the design phase (Lannerand Malmqvist, 1996). The choice of product
architecture has broad implications forproduct performance, product change,product variety, and manufacturability
(Ulrich, 1995). Product architecture is alsostrongly coupled to the firm's development
capability, manufacturing specialties, andproduct strategy (Pimmler and Eppinger,1994).
Typically, product architecture designoccurs during the configuration design stage,that is, after conceptual design but beforeparametric design (Dixon et al., 1988).Configuration design is the process ofsynthesizing product structures by
determining what components and subassembliesare in the product and how theyare arranged spatially and logically.Certainly, product configuration controls aproduct's fabrication and assemblycharacteristics. It also controls a product'sadaptability necessary to respond to changesin customer requirements.
Often, a product's architecture is thoughtof in terms of its modules (Ulrich andEppinger, 1995). A module[1] is a physical orconceptual grouping of components.Modularity is the concept of decomposing asystem into independent parts or modulesthat can be treated as logical units (Pimmlerand Eppinger, 1994). Modular本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。