TY - GEN
T1 - A comprehensive metric for evaluating component commonality in a product family
AU - Thevenot, Henri J.
AU - Simpson, Timothy W.
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - The competitiveness in today's market forces many companies to rethink the way they design (and redesign) products. Instead of developing one product at a time, many manufacturing companies are developing families of products to provide enough variety for the marketplace while keeping costs relatively low. Although the benefits of commonality are widely known, many companies are still not taking full advantage of it when developing new products or redesigning existing ones. One reason is the lack of appropriate methods and useful metrics to assess a product family based on commonality and diversity. Although many component-based commonality metrics have been proposed in the literature, they do not (1) help resolve the tradeoff between commonality and diversity in a product family and (2) capture enough information to be completely useful during product family design and redesign. In this paper, we propose the Comprehensive Metric for Commonality (CMC) to evaluate the design of a product family on a 0-1 scale based on the components in each product, their size, geometry, material, manufacturing process, assembly, costs, and the allowed diversity in a family. To demonstrate the usefulness of this metric for product family benchmarking and redesign, the CMC is compared to six other component-based commonality indices. A CMC-based method is also proposed and applied to a family of staplers to (1) assess the level of commonality in the product family and (2) give recommendations for redesigning the product family.
AB - The competitiveness in today's market forces many companies to rethink the way they design (and redesign) products. Instead of developing one product at a time, many manufacturing companies are developing families of products to provide enough variety for the marketplace while keeping costs relatively low. Although the benefits of commonality are widely known, many companies are still not taking full advantage of it when developing new products or redesigning existing ones. One reason is the lack of appropriate methods and useful metrics to assess a product family based on commonality and diversity. Although many component-based commonality metrics have been proposed in the literature, they do not (1) help resolve the tradeoff between commonality and diversity in a product family and (2) capture enough information to be completely useful during product family design and redesign. In this paper, we propose the Comprehensive Metric for Commonality (CMC) to evaluate the design of a product family on a 0-1 scale based on the components in each product, their size, geometry, material, manufacturing process, assembly, costs, and the allowed diversity in a family. To demonstrate the usefulness of this metric for product family benchmarking and redesign, the CMC is compared to six other component-based commonality indices. A CMC-based method is also proposed and applied to a family of staplers to (1) assess the level of commonality in the product family and (2) give recommendations for redesigning the product family.
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U2 - 10.1115/detc2006-99268
DO - 10.1115/detc2006-99268
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33751348090
SN - 079183784X
SN - 9780791837849
T3 - Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference
BT - Proceedings of 2006 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information In Engineering Conference, DETC2006
PB - American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
T2 - 2006 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information In Engineering Conference, DETC2006
Y2 - 10 September 2006 through 13 September 2006
ER -