Development of a product family analysis toolkit for systematic benchmarking

As global markets saturate and competition intensifies, many manufacturers are focusing on benchmarking families of products alongside individual products to gain valuable insight and strategic advantage over their competitors. Unfortunately, the advantages of benchmarking families of products are often undermined by the limited capability of current benchmarking tools to assist in this process. While methods have been proposed for product family analysis and benchmarking, a major problem is the way in which the component details are collected, and few of the methods have been integrated together. Benchmarking and product family analysis is also time-consuming and subject to human variability since the process is typically done manually without the aid of software. To address these problems, we introduce the Product Family Analysis Toolkit (PFA Toolkit), which combines several popular benchmarking tools to streamline and standardize the process of product family benchmarking. We describe the toolkit's features and capabilities and then discuss its functionality and usability. The advantages of automating the product family benchmarking process are discussed along with future work.