Submitted by –
ANUPAM SARMA (1220111)
This article throws light on product family design and tells us its importance. The review is based on the product families which includes fundamental issues and definitions, product portfolio and product family positioning, platform-based product family design,
Manufacturing and production, as well as supply chain management. The article also discusses about the challenges and new approaches that can be implemented in this field.
The marketing firms believe in the art of introducing variability in their product line which gives us evidence of sales initially but later the sales diminishes due to the concept of ‘law of diminishing returns’.
Decision framework:-
The product family design and development encompasses consecutively five domains i.e., customer, functional, physical, process and logistics domains. The customer needs are translated to functional requirements and these form the front end part of the product family design. Then the functional requirements are mapped to physical parameters by the company.
The back end consists of process variables (PV) and logistics of the product being produced by the company. To achieve this process the method of assemble-to-order and outsourcing are used.
Fundamental Issues:- Product family – A product family refers to a set of similar products that are derived from a common platform and yet possess specific features/functionality to meet particular customer requirements. Each variable or instance in the product family is known as ‘product variant’ or ‘instance’. From marketing point of view they call it a product line, engineers view it as a collection of different technologies.
Product platform:-they can be general, abstract or product specific. They have been divided into two platforms – physical