Mitchell M. Tseng

A methodology of developing product family architecture for mass customization

Mass customization, aiming at delivering an increasing product variety that best serves customer needs while keeping mass production efficiency, has recently received numerous attention and popularity in industry and academia alike. This paper presents a methodology of developing product family architecture (PFA) to rationalize product development for mass customization. Systematic steps are developed to formulate a PFA in terms of functional, technical and physical views. The diverse needs of customers are matched with the capabilities of a firm through systematic planning of modularity in three consecutive views. The development of a PFA provides a unifying integration platform to synchronize market positioning, commonality employment and manufacturing scale of economy across the entire product realization process. A case study in an electronics company is reported to illustrate the potential and the feasibility of PFA methodology.

Towards high value-added products and services: mass customization and beyond

Abstract Mass customization enhances profitability through a synergy of increasing customer-perceived value and reducing the costs of production and logistics. It inherently makes high value-added products and services possible through premium profits derived from customized products. This strength is particularly attractive to OEM-based industries. This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of mass customization for manufacturing industries and service providers. Also outlined is a technological road map for implementing mass customization based on building block identification, product platform development, and product life-cycle integration.

The Customer Centric Enterprise

More than two decades later, in 2003, this prophecy is still a vision not only in the clothing business but also in most other industries. What causes the renowned futurist miss the mark? Though we have most, if not all, the necessary hardware, software, powerful computing and communication systems, including laser cutting, high performance sewing etc, we are still not really able to meet the special yearning of human beings, that very important feature that sets us apart from animals, i.e. creativity. We believe the missing gap is the capacity to put the systems, including organization, process and business models together and make them customer centric. Building a customer centric enterprise that places the demands and wishes of each single customer in the center of value creation implies much more than investing in advanced technologies. Firms have to build not organizations and structures to produce customized services, but organizations and structures for customers. With the customers at the center, human beings can then focus on being creative and be isolated from mundane tasks in order to concentrate on expressing themselves more freely.

Customizability analysis in design for mass customization

Abstract Product customization has been recognized as an effective means to implement mass customization. This paper focuses on the customizability issue of design, that is, to evaluate the cost effectiveness of a design to be customized in order to meet individual customer needs. Three aspects of customizability are identified, namely, (1) design customizability: the intrinsic nature of product by design, which renders customization to be easy or deficient for either customers or the manufacturer, (2) process customizability: the economic latitude of (production) process variations due to product customization, and (3) the value of customization as perceived by the customers. While design customizability is measured based on the information content metric, the evaluation of process customizability follows the general gist of process capability indices. Conjoint analysis is employed to explore customer preference for multiple product features in terms of utility. Customizability analysis thus exhibits a maximization of customer-perceived value while exploiting the potential of design to be customized by achieving optimal design and process customizability indices.

Generic Bill-of-Materials-and-Operations for High-Variety Production Management

High-variety production like mass customization is facing the challenge of effective variety management, which needs to deal with numerous variants of both product and process in order to accommodate diverse customer requirements. To utilize commonality underlying product diversity and process variation, it has been widely accepted as a practice to develop product families, in which a set of similar variants share common product and process structures and variety differentiates within these common structures. Based on such variety implication, this paper proposes a data structure, called generic Bill-of-Materials-and-Operations (BOMO), by unifying Bills- of-Materials (BOM) and routing data into a single set in order to synchronize multiple perspectives on variety such as customer ordering, product engineering, and operations planning. A generic structure is accordingly developed for characterizing variety effectively. The merits of the generic BOMO for integrated product and production data management are detailed in terms of order processing, engi neering change control, production job planning, cost accounting, as well as integrated material and capacity planning. An implementa tion of the proposed generic BOMO methodology in customized souvenir clock manufacturing is also reported.

Understanding product family for mass customization by developing commonality indices

While the rationale of developing the product family as a means to achieve economy of scale and standardization of production has been well recognized in both industry and academia, the fundamental concern regarding developing the product family lies in the fact that a company must optimize the internal complexity and external variety. With this view, this paper recognizes the necessity to understand the product family through developing commonality measurements. The goal of the paper is to present design and process engineers with insight into product family design and its manufacturability. In this paper, two sources of commonality are identified: the component part commonality and the process commonality. The formulation of the component part commonality is based on the mindset of counting the average applications per component part and takes into account product volume, quantity per operation, and the price/cost of the component part. The process commonality index incorporates such concerns as process flexibility, lot sizing, and scheduling sequencing into one analytical measurement. The effects of these two commonality indices on product family design are examined in response to changes in their parameters. Accordingly, the managerial implications are derived. In order to facilitate the understanding of the product family, the feasibility of evaluating the product family by relating commonality indices to the systems performance is discussed.

Architecture of Product Family: Fundamentals and Methodology:

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. This paper investigates 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 sales and engineering perspectives. Also discussed are variety generation methods with 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. A case study of an industrial example is also presented to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed methodology.

Product family modeling for mass customization

With growing reliance on modeling in product development, it is imperative to describe product families in a cohesive way. In particular, mass customization calls for a close integration of product life cycle from customer recognition to delivery and services. This paper proposes a triple-view scheme for modeling product families. Technical challenges are discussed by comparing product family modeling with modeling single products. Individual modeling formalisms for different views are discussed. An example of product family modeling in power supply design is presented to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed approach.

Fundamentals of product family architecture

Recognizing the rationale of a product family architecture (PFA) with respect to design for mass customization (DFMC), this paper discusses the fundamental issues underlying a PFA, including product information modeling, structural implications of product families, functional variety versus technical variety, class‐member relationships inherent in variety, modularity and commonality, PFA design spaces, and PFA composition. The background research is reviewed in terms of product architecture and modularity, product platform and product families, and product modeling and design process models. To organize product varieties in DFMC, a PFA should be described from three different perspectives, namely the functional (as seen from customer, sales and marketing viewpoints), behavioral (as seen from the product technology or design engineer perspective) and structural (as seen from the fulfillment or manufacturing and logistic perspective). Meeting diverse customer requirements and achieving volume economy simultaneously can be best achieved by synchronizing these three perspectives. In fact, the mappings between PFA views manifest the cooperative effort among different business functions, whilst three PFA views facilitate the integration of different phases of product development.

Design by Customers for Mass Customization Products

Abstract Producing what customers need with near mass production efficiency, or Mass Customization, has become a major trend in industry. Effective definition of customer requirements is a pre-requisite for realizing mass customization. We propose “Design by Customers” as an approach for companies to communicate to customers about what the company can offer, to find out customer needs, to assist customers in making choices and to negotiate for agreements. In this paper, the design and manufacturing capabilities of a company are represented in a Product Family Architecture. Adaptive Conjoint Analysis is then applied to help customers assert their needs, define variations from base products, visualize their options and assess alternatives.