8 Product Families for Mass Customization
Understanding
the architecture
Xuehong Du1, Mitchell
M. Tseng2 and Jianxin Jiao3
1 Artesyn Technologies Asia-Pacific Ltd, Hong Kong
2 Department of Industrial Engineering & Engineering Management, The
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Hong Kong
3 School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore
The rationale of developing
product families with respect to satisfying diverse customer needs with
reasonable costs, i.e., mass customization, has been well recognized in
both industry and academia. Earlier research often highlights isolated
and successful empirical studies with limited attempt to explore the theoretical
foundations surrounding this economically important class of engineering
design problem. In this chapter we investigate the fundamental issues
underlying product family development. The concept of Architecture of
Product Family (APF) is introduced as a conceptual structure and overall
logical organization of generating a family of products. APF constructs
including common bases, differentiation enablers, and configuration mechanisms
are discussed from both a sales and an engineering perspective. Further,
variety generation methods are evaluated in regard to producing custom
products based on the modular product architecture and configure-to-order
product development. To support APF-based product family design, a Generic
Product Structure (GPS) is proposed as the platform for tailoring products
to individual customer needs and generating product variants. At the end
of the chapter, we present a case study of an industrial example to illustrate
the feasibility and potential of our proposed framework.
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