Showing papers on "Product design specification published in 2011"

The Role of Product Architecture in the Manufacturing Firm

Abstract: Product architecture is the scheme by which the function of a product is allocated to physical components. This paper further defines product architecture, provides a typology of product architectures, and articulates the potential linkages between the architecture of the product and five areas of managerial importance: (1) product change; (2) product variety; (3) component standardization; (4) product performance; and (5) product development management. The paper is conceptual and foundational, synthesizing fragments from several different disciplines, including software engineering, design theory, operations management and product development management. The paper is intended to raise awareness of the far-reaching implications of the architecture of the product, to create a vocabulary for discussing and addressing the decisions and issues that are linked to product architecture, and to identify and discuss specific trade-offs associated with the choice of a product architecture.

Improving product development process design: a method for managing information flows, risks, and iterations

Abstract: Companies employ a variety of different product development processes (PDPs) to design new products. Well-designed PDPs are necessary to reduce development time, manage risks, and create better products. This study proposes and demonstrates a method with which a company can design a PDP applicable to its unique circumstance. The research uses several case studies and a literature survey to demonstrate the wide variety of PDPs available to companies. The case studies show the importance of matching PDP design to a company's risk profile. The paper employs these lessons to propose a method for improved PDP design. The paper then illustrates the method by discussing how one company is using it to redesign its PDP.

Chemical product design

Abstract: 1 An introduction to chemical product design 2 Needs 3 Ideas 4 Selection 5 Product manufacture 6 Commodity products 7 Devices 8 Molecular products 9 Microstructures 10 A plan for the future

An integration framework for product lifecycle management

Abstract: The need for integrating business and technical information systems, allowing partners to collaborate effectively in creating innovative products, has motivated the design and deployment of a novel integration framework for product lifecycle management. The time is ripe for such an integration framework because of the convergence of three important developments, almost in a perfect storm: (1) maturity of standardized product data and meta-data models, and standardized engineering and business processes; (2) emergence of service-oriented architecture for information sharing; and (3) availability of robust middleware to implement them. These developments allow engineering and business objects and processes to be built or composed as modular pieces of software in the form of services that can communicate with each other and be used across different parts of a business. These modular software pieces can be reused and reconfigured in new ways as business conditions change, thereby saving time and money for companies. This paper describes the business and technical aspects of an integration framework for product lifecycle management using open standards and service-oriented architecture.

An assembly oriented design framework for product structure engineering and assembly sequence planning

Abstract: The paper describes a novel framework for an assembly-oriented design (AOD) approach as a new functional product lifecycle management (PLM) strategy, by considering product design and assembly sequence planning phases concurrently. Integration issues of product life cycle into the product development process have received much attention over the last two decades, especially at the detailed design stage. The main objective of the research is to define assembly sequence into preliminary design stages by introducing and applying assembly process knowledge in order to provide an assembly context knowledge to support life-oriented product development process, particularly for product structuring. The proposed framework highlights a novel algorithm based on a mathematical model integrating boundary conditions related to DFA rules, engineering decisions for assembly sequence and the product structure definition. This framework has been implemented in a new system called PEGASUS considered as an AOD module for a PLM system. A case study of applying the framework to a catalytic-converter and diesel particulate filter sub-system, belonging to an exhaust system from an industrial automotive supplier, is introduced to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed AOD methodology.

Integrated Product Architecture and Pricing for Managing Sequential Innovation

Abstract: Science and technology advances drive firms to continually enhance their product's performance and launch sequentially improving offerings. Firms face challenges in marketing such improving products to well-informed, forward-looking consumers who anticipate product improvements and seek to delay their purchase timing. Product design, specifically a modular upgradable architecture in which improving and stable subsystems of a product are separated and selectively upgraded, can be a valuable approach for marketers to alleviate consumer concerns about product obsolescence. However, such an architecture-based approach can present new challenges as well, and dealing with them requires carefully coordinated cross-functional decision making by the firm. In this paper, we identify and formalize the notion of design inconsistency, which refers to the monopolist firm's inability to commit to future product design architectures. We find that firms experience design inconsistency even when they are able to commit to future prices, and design inconsistency lowers firm profits as well as consumer surplus. We then derive a joint product architecture and pricing approach to solve this problem; this enables an innovating firm to optimally and in a time-consistent manner launch modular upgradable products. The modeling and analysis in the paper lends insight into types of markets and products for which modular upgradability is most appropriate and offers guidelines on making pricing and product design decisions jointly for managing sequential innovation. This paper was accepted by Preyas Desai, marketing.

Traceability and management of dispersed product knowledge during design and manufacturing

Abstract: Product development processes comprise highly creative and knowledge-intensive tasks that involve extensive information exchange and communication among geographically distributed teams. Due to the geographical and institutional separation between the different systems involved in the product lifecycle, retrieving, sharing and exchanging product knowledge is becoming a key issue in information systems of extended enterprise. This paper addresses the issue and challenges of product knowledge traceability during the product development. The aim of this research effort is to enhance the exchange and use of product knowledge acquired during the development process. In order to satisfy the needs for acquisition and reuse of product knowledge, a product knowledge representation framework is proposed. Key elements to support traceability during product development process are identified. The key idea behind this research effort is based on the premises that an important step towards achieving product knowledge sharing is providing traceability across various product knowledge elements that are used in product development phases, i.e. design and manufacturing. Two complementary case studies illustrating the benefit of traceability are presented. The potential role of traceability is described, first to support the decision making process during engineering change management, and second to support product oriented modelling for knowledge sharing and exchanging to meet quality requirements.

Domain-Assisted Product Aspect Hierarchy Generation: Towards Hierarchical Organization of Unstructured Consumer Reviews

Abstract: This paper presents a domain-assisted approach to organize various aspects of a product into a hierarchy by integrating domain knowledge (e.g., the product specifications), as well as consumer reviews. Based on the derived hierarchy, we generate a hierarchical organization of consumer reviews on various product aspects and aggregate consumer opinions on these aspects. With such organization, user can easily grasp the overview of consumer reviews. Furthermore, we apply the hierarchy to the task of implicit aspect identification which aims to infer implicit aspects of the reviews that do not explicitly express those aspects but actually comment on them. The experimental results on 11 popular products in four domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Investigating the safe evolution of software product lines

Abstract: The adoption of a product line strategy can bring significant productivity and time to market improvements. However, evolving a product line is risky because it might impact many products and their users. So when evolving a product line to introduce new features or to improve its design, it is important to make sure that the behavior of existing products is not affected. In fact, to preserve the behavior of existing products one usually has to analyze different artifacts, like feature models, configuration knowledge and the product line core assets. To better understand this process, in this paper we discover and analyze concrete product line evolution scenarios and, based on the results of this study, we describe a number of safe evolution templates that developers can use when working with product lines. For each template, we show examples of their use in existing product lines. We evaluate the templates by also analyzing the evolution history of two different product lines and demonstrating that they can express the corresponding modifications and then help to avoid the mistakes that we identified during our analysis.

The impact of product configurators on lead times in engineering-oriented companies

Abstract: This paper presents a study of how the use of product configurators affects business processes of engineering-oriented companies. A literature study shows that only a minor part of product configuration research deals with the effects of product configuration, and that the ones that do are mostly vague when reporting the effects of configurator projects. Only six cases were identified, which provide estimates of the actual size of lead time reduction achieved from product configurators. To broaden this knowledge, this paper presents the results of a study of 14 companies concerning the impact of product configurators on business processes related to the creation of quotes and detailed product specifications. The study documents impressive results of the application of configurator technology. For example, in the data retrieved the use of configurators was estimated to have implied up to a 99.9% reduction of the quotation lead time with an average estimated reduction of 85.5%.

How to design and utilize online customer center to support new product concept generation

Abstract: Websites can be effective vehicles for firms to communicate with their customers but the use of websites has been limited to pacifying complaint customers. To better use a website's information, this research presents a framework for extracting customer opinions from websites and transforming them into product specification data. For the purpose, firstly, customer opinions were collected from an online customer center and then transformed into customer needs using text-mining. Then, after customers were segmented into several groups based on their needs, relations among their needs were visualized by co-word analysis and product specifications to meet those needs t analyzed by decision tree. Lastly, a final target product specification for new products were determined and a target market was identified based on customer profile data. The suggested framework enables to incorporate customer opinions efficiently with new product development processes and to design online customer centers to better collect and analyze useful information.

A generalised framework to compass and to support complex product engineering processes

Abstract: Today, companies are required to boost their productivity with product and process innovation. However, product engineering has become more and more complex, as there are multiple interrelated elements with high dynamic and variance as well as socio-technical aspects to be considered. To support both the work of designers and of managers, various methodologies have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we highlight key issues of product engineering and derive requirements on a modelling framework that addresses contemporary challenges of rising complexity. With the help of the description of an exemplary project, we introduce and illustrate an approach to meet these requirements ? the Integrated Product Engineering Model (iPeM).

A product lifecycle management methodology for supporting knowledge reuse in the consumer packaged goods domain

Abstract: The present globalized market is forcing many companies to invest in new strategies and tools for supporting knowledge management. This aspect is becoming a key factor in the industrial competitiveness for the presence of extended enterprises that normally deal with huge data exchange and share processes. This scenario is due to the presence of partners geographically distributed over the entire globe, that participate in different steps of the product lifecycle (product development, maintenance and recycling). At present, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) seems to be the appropriate solution to support enterprises in this complex scenario, even though a real standardized approach for the implementation of knowledge sharing and management tools does not exist today. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to develop a knowledge management operative methodology able to support the formalization and the reuse of the enterprise expertise acquired while working on previous products. By focusing on consumer packaged goods enterprises and on the concept development phase (which is one of the most knowledge intensive phases of the whole product lifecycle), this research work has developed a new systematic methodology to support knowledge codification and knowledge management operations. The new methodology integrates the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and the Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadatch (TRIZ). Also, a case study on the problem of waste disposal has been conducted to validate the proposed methodology.

Theoretical versus actual product variety: how much customisation do customers really demand?

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge the common claim of “infinite variety” being demanded in the marketplace by measuring not just how much variety theoretically could be produced, but how much is actually demanded by the customer. To this effect, the authors propose and validate market‐based variety measures with empirical data and in a second step, extend their analysis by applying these measures and empirically testing the impact of variety mitigation strategies, such as postponement and options bundling.Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyse production and sales data of 226,106 passenger cars, comprising of three models of one vehicle manufacturer sold across four global market regions. The theoretical variety is compared with actual variety for each model‐market combination, and these data are linked to actual production and sales records.Findings – The authors propose and validate product variety measures based on actual customer orders, and empirically demonstrate how the...

Integrating supplier selection in optimal product family design

Abstract: Product family design and supplier selection are traditionally separated in two successive stages. First, product development teams determine optimal levels of the attributes of product components for each product variant of a product family, and purchasing departments then choose the qualified suppliers with the lowest cost. However, decoupling the two decision processes may lead to suboptimal solutions with regard to the total market profit of a company. In this article, a unified optimisation model, which integrates product family design with supplier selection, is established with the objective of maximising the total profit of a product family. Consumer purchase behaviour, supplier availability and outsourcing-related cost are considered in the model. A linear programming embedded genetic algorithm was developed to solve the proposed model. A case study is presented to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithms.

An Integrative Methodology for Product and Supply Chain Design Decisions at the Product Design Stage

Abstract: Supplier selection is one of the key decisions in supply chain management. Companies need not only to make the "make" or "buy" decisions but also differentiate across potential suppliers in order to improve operational performance. Product design is an engineering based activity that realizes the customer requirements into functions of a new product. Many studies have pointed out that the integration of product and supply chain is a key factor for profitability and efficiency. However, most studies address supply chain performance after freezing the design of the product; only a few studies discuss when and how to incorporate supply chain decisions during product design. This paper presents a graph theory based optimization methodology to tackle this problem. The supplier selection issue is considered by evaluating its impact on both internal (e.g., ease of assembly) and external (e.g., transportation time) enterprise performances, which are aggregated as supply chain performance at the conceptual design stage. A case study in the bicycle industry demonstrates the advantages of this methodology. The presented mathematical programming formulation enables simultaneous optimization of both product design and supply chain design during the early design stages.

Technology Strategy in a Software Products Company

Abstract: An overly narrow focus on core competencies and technologies may cause a firm to miss market opportunities. On the other hand, a firm's ongoing success depends on its ability to recognize and nurture the technologies necessary for the continual refinement and extension of its product families. This process of product renewal requires effective management of technological innovation, which in turn requires a clear understanding of the technological basis for a product family—that is, the product platform from which derivative or follow-on products are created. Using a software company as an example, Marc H. Meyer and Luis Lopez present a method for understanding the relationship between the nurturing of core technologies and the evolution of a product family. At the foundation of this method is the concept of a product platform—the core technologies that are common to all members of a product family. In other words, a platform provides the basic technological architecture for a series of derivative products. From an initial platform, a product family can evolve in two ways: through platform extensions or platform renewals. Platform extensions may involve changes to existing subsystems or the addition of new subsystems without altering the primary subsystems and interfaces in the existing design. Platform renewal is the redesign of a product to create an entirely new platform. To provide a basis for evaluating the effects of the software company's allocation of R&D expenditures, the authors created a product family map that differentiated between platform improvements and derivative product developments. Using the product family map, they examined R&D budgets and identified the allocation of spending among the core technologies embodied in the firms's products. The visual presentation of the product family maps and core capability investments were particularly useful for helping company management understand and learn from the consequences of past decisions. The analysis of the product family maps and R&D expenditures also provides a guideline for future decision-making. Specifically, to achieve desired amounts of technical and commercial leverage, successive product platforms in a product family must provide both balance and strength in the embodied core technologies. For market applications involving more than one core technology, a firm must pursue a balanced, inclusive technology strategy. In such cases, overemphasis on one core technology typically results in poor market performance.

Product design analysis based on life cycle features

Abstract: In this research, we effectively integrate the downstream activities of the design process and present a product model representation. Using an extended definition of feature, the product model is represented by its life cycle features, design for X attributes, geometrical and topological information, material features, etc. The relationship between the product features defined makes possible the use of an object-oriented approach to represent the product model with the complete description of the life cycle applications such as the assembly, disassembly, recycling, maintainability, environment, etc. In this way, the designer is able to assess the design performance regarding each life cycle application and redesign the product model accordingly. Since current CAD systems cannot represent the proposed life cycle features, life cycle feature system is implemented using OpenCascade, a geometry kernel and C++ programming. The representation of a product model that integrates the product life cycle features, ...

A structural matrix-based modelling for designing product variety

Abstract: The design process is an important stage in new product development. An information model is a useful tool for analysing and improving a complex design process and product architecture because it allows the designer to visualise information flow. Based on graph theory and the weighting concept, this paper presents a quantified design structure matrix, which is a systematic planning method of optimising design priorities and product architecture for managing product variety from an informational structure perspective. Focusing on product variety and the design process in concurrent engineering, the planning model is divided into two phases: global planning and local planning. The proposed method helps designers optimise design planning and plan better design strategies for product variety. It can be applied in developing future generations of a product based on an existing product. A case study is used to illustrate this method. The results verify that designers can concurrently create variant design solut...

Assessing product family design from an end-of-life perspective

Abstract: Product family design via component sharing is a widely practiced approach for offering sufficient variety to the market in an economical way. When discussing product family design, most previous research has focused on its benefits in the design and manufacturing stages. This article highlights another important aspect of product family design: the impact of component sharing on end-of-life management. This article presents a quantitative model for assessing product family design from an end-of-life perspective. Using mixed integer programming, the developed model identifies an optimal strategy for managing product take-back and end-of-life recovery, thereby assessing the product family design in terms of its profitability in end-of-life management. Especially, the model incorporates increased component interchangeability by component sharing. A design study of a smart phone family is presented, as an illustration, and the results show that the model can assess profitability of a family design and highli...

Geometric skeleton computation enabling concurrent product engineering and assembly sequence planning

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel modelling approach to geometric skeleton computation enabling concurrent product engineering and assembly sequence planning. Current engineering vision has recently moved towards new modelling and management paradigms to maintain competitive edges all along the product lifecycle. Consistent with concurrent engineering and design for X stakes, this recent shift promotes cross-X and knowledge-intensive philosophies in the product development process, principally focused on lifecycle engineering. The main objective of this research is to integrate assembly process engineering information and knowledge in the early phases of the product development process in a top-down and proactive manner, in order to provide a geometric skeleton-based assembly context for designers. The definition of the product and its related assembly sequence requires both the enhancement and the entire understanding of product relationships between the various product components, and its related assembly rationale. As a consequence, this new modelling approach highlights the need to integrate various stakeholders' viewpoints involved in the beginning of the product lifecycle. In such a context, earlier work has achieved the early generation of an optimal assembly sequence in the product development process, before the product geometry is completely defined. As a result, previous research has made possible to control and bind the product modelling phase through an assembly oriented product structure. The aim of the proposed approach is to compute and define a geometric skeleton model based on product relational information and the early-defined assembly sequence. The proposed approach-called SKeLeton geometry-based Assembly Context Definition (SKL-ACD)-enables the control of the product modelling phase by introducing skeleton entities consistent with product relationships and assembly sequence planning information. A prototype application within a CAD tool has been developed for aiding geometric skeleton computation and generation. Lastly, an industrial case study is introduced to highlight the feasibility and the relevance of the proposed modelling approach.

Modular product architecture for productivity enhancement

Abstract: Purpose – The aims of this article are to introduce a modularization framework and a method for the formation of modules.Design/methodology/approach – A methodological framework is presented to guide designers and engineers in the formation and selection of suitable modules in developing customized products. Detailed explanations of the framework are presented theoretically. This framework interacts with different product development participants such as resources, customers' preferences, design architecture for planning, and scheduling a custom‐built product. A new method is proposed with a case example to facilitate the formation of modules.Findings – This paper investigates the potential of the modularization framework, usable for prioritizing the components dependencies and creating required number of modules. It also explains the overall concept, usability and rules/methods for the module formation applied to product design, to allow a greater degree of freedom for the designer, and the opportunity t...

Handbook of Sustainable Textile Production

Abstract: Sustainable development as a goal in production, marketing and trade The supply chain of textiles Product specification and textile process technology Textile life cycle assessment (LCA) and ecological key figures Product development and marketing of sustainable textiles.

Critical success factors in managing modular production design: Six company case studies in Hong Kong, China, and Singapore

Abstract: Many researchers have explored the advantages of modular product design, its design methods and its effects on product performance. Modular design is, for example, required for product platform, mass customization and postponement in order to achieve greater product variety and differentiation. However, a few empirical studies explicitly examine how to coordinate modular product design in a managerial way. This paper addresses it by conducting multiple case studies with six companies which have successfully adopted modular product design for five years. Seven critical factors are explored in the management of modular product design. These are pre-defined product advantage, selectively used design rules, module definition, system integration, technological newness, internal communication, and supplier and customer involvement. While most of the literature studies the technical dimension of modular design within a firm, this study focuses on the managerial side across the supply chain. It gives new insights on how to manage modular product design and proposes future research opportunities.

Synthesizing products for online catalogs

Abstract: A comprehensive product catalog is essential to the success of Product Search engines and shopping sites such as Yahoo! Shopping, Google Product Search, and Bing Shopping. Given the large number of products and the speed at which they are released to the market, keeping catalogs up-to-date becomes a challenging task, calling for the need of automated techniques. In this paper, we introduce the problem of product synthesis, a key component of catalog creation and maintenance. Given a set of offers advertised by merchants, the goal is to identify new products and add them to the catalog, together with their (structured) attributes. A fundamental challenge in product synthesis is the scale of the problem. A Product Search engine receives data from thousands of merchants about millions of products; the product taxonomy contains thousands of categories, where each category has a different schema; and merchants use representations for products that are different from the ones used in the catalog of the Product Search engine.We propose a system that provides an end-to-end solution to the product synthesis problem, and addresses issues involved in data extraction from offers, schema reconciliation, and data fusion. For the schema reconciliation component, we developed a novel and scalable technique for schema matching which leverages knowledge about previously-known instance-level associations between offers and products; and it is trained using automatically created training sets (no manually-labeled data is needed). We present an experimental evaluation using data from Bing Shopping for more than 800K offers, a thousand merchants, and 400 categories. The evaluation confirms that our approach is able to automatically generate a large number of accurate product specifications. Furthermore, the evaluation shows that our schema reconciliation component outperforms state-of-the-art schema matching techniques in terms of precision and recall.

Integration between MES and Product Lifecycle Management

Abstract: Today, within the global Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach, success of design, industrialization and production activities depends on the ability to improve interaction between information systems that handle such activities. Enterprises deploy mainly PLM system, Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) in order to manage sufficient product-related information and provide better customer-products. This paper proposes a methodological approach to integrate product data generated during product design, industrialization and production. This involves the PLM and MES integration. Thus, the proposed approach aims to overcome the problem of data heterogeneity by proposing a mediation system resolving syntactic and semantic conflicts.