View
221
Download
1
Category
Preview:
Citation preview
Guidelines to minimize variation whenestimating product line commonalitythrough product family dissection
Henri J. Thevenot and Timothy W. Simpson, Industrial and Manufacturing
Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, 329 Leonhard Building,
University Park, PA 16802, USA
This paper discusses two experiments conducted to investigate the variation that
arises when estimating the Product Line Commonality Index (PCI) for a family
of products when using data gathered from product dissection. In the first
experiment, three main sources of variation were identified: (1) different levels
of dissection, (2) omitted components, and (3) different values for the factors
used to compute PCI. In the second experiment, guidelines for dissecting
subassemblies to the lowest level possible and predefined tables listing material,
manufacturing and assembly/fastening schemes were found to significantly
reduce variation, leading to more systematic and consistent methods of product
family analysis.
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: product design, design tools, user participation, product dissection
Todays highly competitive and global marketplace is redefining the way
many companies do business. They are faced with the challenge of pro-
viding as much variety as possible for the market with as little variety
as possible between the products. Instead of designing new products one at
a time, which results in poor commonality and standardization and dramati-
cally increases costs, many companies are now designing product families, al-
lowing the development of a sufficient variety of products to meet the
customers demands while keeping costs relatively low.
As more manufacturing companies seek to benchmark, redesign and consoli-
date their product lines, there is an increased need for systematic and consis-
tent approaches to product family dissection and analysis. While methods
have been proposed for product family redesign and benchmarking (Thevenot
et al., 2005; Thevenot and Simpson, 2006), a major problem is the way in
which information is collected. When product design information is not read-
ily available, product dissection needs to be performed on the products in the
family being redesigned to collect appropriate information. The problem with
product dissection is that it is a heavily human-based activity, and variation in
the information collected can occur, such as differences in the level of
Corresponding author:
T. W. Simpson
tws8@psu.edu
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
0142-694X $ - see front matter Design Studies 28 (2007) 175e194
doi:10.1016/j.destud.2006.07.004 175 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain
Recommended