How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

A great challenge facing industry today is managing variety throughout the entire products life cycle. Drivers of products variety, its benefits, pre-requisites and associated complexity and cost are presented. Enhancing consumers’ value through variety and approaches for achieving it efficiently including modularity, commonality and differentiation are discussed. Variant-oriented manufacturing systems paradigms, as enablers of product variety, and the effective co-development of variants and their manufacturing systems to ensure economic sustainability are reviewed. Industrial applications and guidelines to achieve economy of scope with advantages of economy of scale are discussed. Perspectives and insights on future research in this field are offered.

Product Variety Management

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ykoren/uploads/Assembly_System_Design_and_Operations.pdf

Assembly system design and operations for product variety

Engineering change has grown steadily in prominence both as an important issue for industry and as an active academic research area This paper provides a categorised overview and perspective on the published academic literature on engineering change The aim is to give new researchers an understanding of the field’s breadth and depth, as well as pointers towards additional information, and established researchers a non-dogmatic summary perspective on the work accomplished in this area Change is defined as an alteration made to parts, drawings or software that have already been released during the product design process and life cycle, regardless of the scale or the type of the change A change may encompass any modification to the form, fit and/or function of the product as a whole or in part, and may alter the interactions and dependencies of the constituent elements of the product Key aspects of the engineering change process are highlighted along with the tools and methods that are available to support the process The nature of products (in terms of complexity, architecture and degree of innovation) and how that affects engineering change are covered Important related areas such as organisational structure and employee attitudes are also highlighted The paper concludes by discussing different strategies that have been proposed to cope with engineering change in today’s manufacturing environment

Engineering change: an overview and perspective on the literature

Design methodologies: Industrial and educational applications

After the industrial revolution, the literature has mentioned different “principles” to allow a better management of the production and product life cycle activities. For example the principle of standardization was first mentioned in the literature by an automobile engineer and placed in a real context by Henry Ford. Standardization has made possible the configuration of different products using a large set of common components. Another strategy called “modularization” was first mentioned in the literature in the 60s. The modularity proposed to group components of products in a module for practical production objectives. Today, modularity and standardization are promising tools in product family development because they allow to design a variety of products using the same modules of components called “platforms”. Using platforms allows important family design savings and easy manufacturing. In this paper we give a literature review of the platform concept with a special interest on the efficient product family development. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 mentions the general context of modularity to develop product variety. Section 2 details the importance of product architectures in the literature for a modular design. Section 3 points on some important works that apply some modular and platform methodologies.

Modular and platform methods for product family design: literature analysis

Maintenance process and planning are at the heart of industrial occupations. Processes and equipments require controls and strategies to reduce costs and yield loss. Risk Based Maintenance (RBM) helps in reducing machinery failure rate and managing actions priorities. This paper proposes a method using FMECA as an operational tool which unveils productivity improvement areas. It demonstrates that it is possible to use FMECA method in a more dynamic environment, continuously updated by operational events. The article proposes a risk based maintenance method, which relies on the regular and automatic update of equipments risk analyses including equipment failure history. The method gives up-to-date information about equipments' risks. The article is structured in four parts. After a risk management domain literature overview, the paper presents a new risk based maintenance method. A case study in semiconductor industry shows that FMECA can be employed in a dynamic way for managing maintenance activities. The proposed model simplifies and makes more reliable risks identification and estimation. Results and a brief discussion conclude the article.

http://www.mgi.polymtl.ca/Samuel.Bassetto/papers/JLPP1.pdf

Dynamic risk management unveil productivity improvements

This paper deals with an approach for Product Information Systems (PIS) engineering by reuse of patterns. Patterns form generic solutions to problems frequently occurring during PIS specification and implementation. The pattern approach provides an engineering guide to model data by organizing hierarchically and functionally modeling problems and the manner to resolve them. Their use would contribute to accelerate building and implementing product and process models during PIS specification and implementation. Two kind of patterns are distinguished: business patterns used for specification and providing solutions for application field problems and software patterns used for implementation and providing solutions for technical problems (software). A special interest is given to identify and specify different business patterns for product modeling during PIS specification. However, a pattern-based approach can be developed only for disciplines which acquired a certain maturity, i.e. those for which there is both a consensus around a finite set of problems and a variety of known solutions for solving these problems. There is no universal agreement on the knowledge needed in product information systems, let alone on the representation of this knowledge and we therefore find it impossible to discuss product information systems without reference to what kind of knowledge is being managed. The first step consisted thus of constructing a general reference framework based on PIS concepts, providing a common terminology and a semantic of the principal concepts managed in PIS and proposing various models to fix these concepts. It forms a basis for exploring the problems frequently occurring during PIS specification. A pattern language is thus defined to resolve the identified problems, basing partially on existing design pattern catalogues.

Product information systems engineering: an approach for building product models by reuse of patterns

Engineering Changes (EC) implementation in product definition and at all stages of the product life cycle cannot be avoided when struggling for innovation and maintaining the product in accordance with the contractually agreed specifications. These “micro” design actions usually provide large profits on both product and processes and allow a flexibility that Concurrent Engineering requires. If EC management looks a rather simple activity for organizations offering small products on the market, it gets more complex in industries such as aeronautics or automotive industry where the whole supply chain can be impacted. In such industries, this key process remains difficult to control as few performance indicators exist. This lack of measurement does not enable any corrective action to be undertaken. In this paper, an overview of EC management for complex products is presented from the experience we have gained in the aeronautics and automotive industries. First, potential causes and consequences are presented and a generic process for EC management is proposed. Then, the importance of measuring the performances of such a process is highlighted in order to identify any room for improvement. Afterwards, our approach to design and implement a measurement plan for EC processes is detailed. A significant set of indicators and measurement is proposed and discussed according to the specific process we have focused on.

Performances in Engineering Changes Management

The model presented in this chapter is based on a feature concept in a simultaneous engineering context. We have particularly developed, in addition to the usual features, some specific features we call ‘skin features’ and ‘skeleton features’. These last one respectively represent: 

1

the functional surfaces of the parts, that are integrated elements of the technological solutions chosen by the designer in order to answer to the required functions. These surfaces are given with their tolerances, their accessibility areas…




2

the material flow which has to link the skin features in a same part.

Michel Tollenaere

Papers

Modular and platform methods for product family design: literature analysis

Dynamic risk management unveil productivity improvements

Product information systems engineering: an approach for building product models by reuse of patterns

Performances in Engineering Changes Management

A part description model for the preliminary design