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Design hierarchy

Design hierarchy

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Book
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The advent of the buyers’ market has imposed a necessity on manufacturing companies to suit individual customer requirements. Companies have answered this need by offering a large variety from which customers choose their ideal products. However, offering a large product variety is not a solution when this variety is accompanied by high internal co...

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Freeform optical surfaces offer significant design opportunities but pose new challenges in metrology and manufacturing. Evolution in optics manufacturing processes have changed the surface spatial frequencies that must be measured. Optical surface definition is expected to be with respect to fiducials and datums which must be realizable at all sta...

Citations

... Using the concept of standardized parts and engineering patterns, resulting from a modular business process architecture, offers the foundation for agile mass customization [12] in business process design, using a proven method to deal with variety. In this endeavor, we investigate the possibility of integrating requirements from the business operations, information systems and information technology domains at the lowest level of functional specification. ...
Chapter
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In many business environments, we find extensive business process structures that consist of many individual processes, each with a complex composition of activities. The elements in the processes are often based on an ad-hoc, existing way of working, which is not always properly documented. The processes evolve over time, not rarely on a per-process basis. Consequently, process definitions diverge and the use of process elements within and between process definitions becomes misaligned. To address this issue, we propose the use of catalogs of standardized process building blocks in business process engineering. Different from approaches using patterns, we base our catalogs on foundational parts (which we call primitives) organized in three dimensions: business process activities, objects manipulated by activities, and actors performing activities – starting with the semantics of processes, not the syntax. To provide a solid basis for the structuring of each of the dimensions (and hence the organization of the foundational parts in the catalogs), we use taxonomies. In this paper, we discuss the development of these taxonomies. We apply a slightly modified existing taxonomy development method, which uses both deductive and inductive steps. We discuss the development of one taxonomy in detail, basing the inductive steps on processes from a complex, real-world case organization. In doing so, we make a first step towards a business process engineering approach that is centered on a process-content-first point of view, aligned with the needs of the process management practice.
... Up until now, a vast body of knowledge related to product variety exists. Several practical concepts have been developed to support product variety management, such as various forms of standardization (Ulrich, 1995), modularization (Erixon et al., 1996), product family design (Erens, 1996), and product platform development (Wheelwright and Clark, 1992;Meyer and Lehnerd, 1997;Sawhney, 1998;Jiao et al., 2000;Salvador et al., 2002;Halman et al., 2003;Simpson et al., 2006;Jiao et al., 2007a;Alizon et al., 2007;Krause and Eilmus, 2011;Levandowski et al., 2013;Johannesson et al., 2017;Meyer et al., 2017). Although variety traditionally concerns products through the eyeglasses of marketing, engineering, and distribution, variety in production exist too. ...
... Because a technical system can be denoted a product, a production process, or a production resource, a family of technical systems can refer to a family of products, a family of production processes, or a family of production resources. Especially, there are several publications related product variety and product family design, for example Erens (1996), Simpson (1998), andJiao et al. (2007b). Also integrated product-production approaches have been developed, such as the design of product families with the influence of production resource constraints (Kimura and Nielsen, 2005), and approaches for the co-development of products and production systems (Bryan et al., 2007;Tolio et al., 2010;ElMaraghy and Abbas, 2015). ...
... Main reference: (Erens, 1996) ...
Conference Paper
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Variety traditionally denotes products that serve a wide range of customer needs. However, variety in production exists too. Like products, production processes and production resources may also embody variety to serve the production fulfillment of a product variety. In this paper, product variety and variety in production are described and contrasted through a literature review. The aim is to serve the engineering design community with an elevated perspective of variety in production and its relation to product variety.
... SBCE theoretical grounds have previously been expressed while extracting important aspects of the approach such as the exploration of a design space, the extensive use of prototypes and the very specific concurrent engineering practices that hold alternative designs long into the development process by delaying decisions. From a practical PD standpoint, handling multiple design alternatives during the development process usually calls for configurability of the product or the platform as prerequisite (Claesson, 2006;Claesson & Johannesson, 2006;Erens, 1996;Hegge, 1995;Männistö, Peltonen, Soininen, & Sulonen, 2001;Sabin & Weigel, 1998;Van Veen, 1991;Wortmann & Erens, 1995). For these reasons, the combination of keywords selected to query the research databases is listed below. ...
... modelling by (Johannesson & Claesson, 2005) are used as the backbone to enable the approach during product platform design. Likewise, product structuring and configurable product models span multiple domains of the lifecycle (functional, technological, physical + process) and they are suitable for both product platform and single product (whatsoever) design/development (Andreasen, Hansen, & Mortensen, 1996;Erens, 1996;Huet, Fortin, McSorley, & Toche, 2011;Männistö et al., 2001;Toche et al., 2012;Wortmann & Erens, 1995), but they are rarely discussed in SBCE literature from a holistic PD perspective and by using a continuum of tools and methodology as they pertain to large-scale industry conventional PD supporting framework i.e. PDM/PLM. ...
... The same approach and resulting gaps remain present in these authors latest publication i.e. (Johannesson et al., 2017) as acquired through the systematic review monitoring process following the first round dual framework analysis reported in this section. It is argued in this thesis that product modelling and configurable product models span multiple domains of the lifecycle i.e. functional, technological, physical, process (Andreasen et al., 1996;Erens, 1996;Huet et al., 2011;Männistö et al., 2001;Toche et al., 2012;Wortmann & Erens, 1995) and their ability to enable SBCE can be explored from a holistic PD perspective and by using a continuum of tools and methodology as they pertain to large-scale industry conventional PD supporting framework i.e. PDM/PLM. ...
Thesis
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The work reported in this thesis is the result of seven years of participatory action research in the field of Lean Product Development (LPD) in aerospace engineering. This research is motivated by the necessity to develop understanding and support for practical implementations of lean product development and especially Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) in industry. Such necessity is justified by 21st century compelling socioeconomic factors that demand robust, resilient, responsive, flexible, innovative, adaptable and lean product development processes in order for companies to stay competitive in rapidly changing markets. The main purpose of the research is to identify and develop the essential SBCE and LPD aspects, characteristics, features and catalysts as they relate to aerospace large-scale industrial product development in order to form a holistic model that can support practical implementations of LPD in industry from a product lifecycle perspective. A design research methodology (DRM) is used for planning and executing the design research project while ensuring that focus is placed on achieving progress with regards to understanding and implementation of SBCE and LPD as Design practices. As a result, this thesis work provides substantial contribution to understanding of LPD and SBCE and furthermore, entails valuable proposal for the practice in industry through the CCS model and the construction of the Learning Value Streams (LVS) model. The contributions go as follows: (1) The proposal of a new SBCE dual analysis framework combined with an evidence-based systematic review methodology; (2) The advancement of theoretical and practical understanding of LPD and SBCE from the larger to the most significant aspects; (3) The advancement of theoretical and practical understanding of product models and product structure progression requirements for lean product lifecycle management; (4) the proposal of a new methodology, including new as-tested structure to support cross-collaboration during prototyping and testing in lifecycle management contexts; (5) The proposal of a new existential domain alongside the functional, technological and physical domains in order to address the lack of product modelling constructs and methodology when it comes to service or as-tested configurations, hardware testing transactions and prototype information tracking on the basis of serialized components; (6) The construction of the multi-domain Configurable Complementary Structures (CCS) model for practical implementations of SBCE in lifecycle management contexts, and finally; (7) The extrapolation of CCS to LVS to form a holistic model that can support the transition from traditional product development to SBCE and LPD in a product lifecycle perspective. The new existential domain and the overall CCS model can be considered the main outcomes of the thesis, while LVS represents a path towards continuous research and improvement of LPD implementation in a lifecycle perspective. Keywords: lean product development, set-based design, set-based concurrent engineering, variability, product architecture, product modelling, configuration management, product lifecycle management, aerospace engineering, digital mock-up, prototyping.
... Furthermore, it is important to note that modularity may present limitations in this phase. Modular designs can contain redundant structures, sacrifice performance or lead to over-designed products (Erens, 1996;Durand et al., 2010;Krishnan and Gupta, 2001;Newcomb et al., 1998;Ulrich, 1995). Overdesigned products and the faulty design of interfaces may increase environmental impact through excessive energy consumption or premature disposal. ...
Article
Modularity is a strategy recognized by the academia and the industry, and modular architecture is argued to play an important role in the development of sustainable products. The objective of this article is to explore the intersection between modularity and sustainable design from the perspective of the product life cycle. To achieve this objective, a systematic review was conducted and a total of 81 articles were selected and distributed in seven different categories of subjects: Life Cycle Assessment, Design for X, Green Modularization, Manufacture, Modularization Reviews, Supply Chain, and Usage. We identified in the literature that: (i) benefits are claimed in every life cycle phase (production, use, and disposal); (ii) academic research is mainly focused in the production phase and in projecting product disposal scenarios, offering a wide variety of methods and methodologies to modularize products with environmental concerns. However, modularity could also present limitations, and the realization of its benefits is partially influenced by user's decisions. Our conclusion points that, in spite of the association of modularity with environmental benefits, a better understanding of the entire life cycle of modular products and their environmental impact is needed to decide whether modularization is a suitable sustainable strategy or not.
... The main structure of the overview is split into two main dimensions: product and technology and follows a diabolo structure (Erens, 1996), as illustrated inFigure 1. The structure is linked to the granularity view of a product and the tiers get input from each other. ...
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In order to have a better base for decisions, R&D managers need to know what the critical areas of development are in relation to the technologies they develop, mature, and include in the portfolio. As most of the technologies in a company have the potential to have a significant impact on competition, the challenge is to know how to identify and prioritize the development tasks. If possible, an effective strategy can be defined. This article suggests a framework for identification and analysis of a product portfolio, with special emphasis on identifying critical technology building blocks based on reasoning about product properties. Current approaches lack such views, and by focusing on these, potential make or break decisions are better supported. It is suggested to adopt the proposed framework to clarify where in the portfolio the technology needs critical attention for the next development steps. The framework is based on methods and theories in literature. The analysis of the portfolio is carried out through the framework in three steps: by creating an overview of the portfolio encompassing product and technology, assessing the elements in the overview with assessment metrics, and using property chains to identify critical technology building blocks.
... Robertson and Ulrich (1998) extend this definition by adding common product technologies, structures, production methods, and related product knowledge to the platform. According to Erens (1996), all product variants that are based on the same product platform and are derived by adding, substituting, or removing modules can be summarized into a product family. Meyer and Lehnerd (1997) define a product family as a set of similar products that are configured from a common platform to meet specific customer requirements. ...
Article
Current implementation methodologies for platform-based development strategies presume that product variants are made clear and explicit prior to application. However, this might not be the case in many engineer-to-order companies where product variants typically emerge from individual developments over time, commonly without a predefined product strategy. Also, information related to different product variants is usually spread across multiple sources. This makes it difficult to identify the information on which a future configure-to-order strategy can be built. In this article, a systematic, visual approach to identify, analyze, and structure product variant information has been developed. A real-world, proof-of-concept demonstrator case has been defined to verify the proposed modeling approach applied to the unstructured product portfolio of a small- and medium-sized enterprise company that manufactures road signpost masts and gantries. The outcome is a product portfolio map that visualizes the product variants in the product family side by side, and a variant map that provides a closer overview of functional structure and related physical variants. Hence, these two maps combined provide a systemized overview of the product variants at different abstraction levels as a knowledge source. It is concluded that this study has demonstrated the potential of a step-by-step methodology for preparing a dispersed product portfolio as a basis for the implementation of a configure-to-order strategy.
... 7 In product configuration design, a functional attribute is a feature used to specify a unique variant of a product family (Erens, 1996). For instance, the Samsung SGH-U600 mobile phone is equipped with an FM player, whereas the Samsung SGH-F480 is equipped with an MP3/MPEG-4 player. ...
Article
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This paper applies the stereotype change theory to help bridge a major literature gap on co-branding partner selection: why both identical and highly different brand pairs often fail. We argue that, given that a primary goal of establishing a co-branding alliance is to positively revise consumers’ beliefs about important attributes of the allying brands, the case of no belief-revision can lead to a failure of the alliance. We show that both an identical and a highly incongruent partnership in terms of attribute-level difference can fail due to the lack of belief-revision. We report that a moderately incongruent brand pair is a promising decision on co-branding partner selection. In doing so, our research contributes to the explanation of why the two “extreme” types of co-branding alliances may fail from the perspective of consumer evaluation. For brand managers, we offer a normative guideline for co-branding partner selection.
... Nissan, for example, famously offered 87 different types of steering wheel for a single car model (Chandler and Williams, 1993). On the other hand, commonality can potentially lead to compromises in product quality (Erens, 1997). ...
Book
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This report studies the role of high-impact firms in the Finnish business environment from an ecosystems perspective. We study six clusters of firms representing the creative, environmental, experience, health, ICT, and maritime sectors. Our research team identified 1,572 SMEs that met the criteria for high-impact firms, accounting for 5 percent of total small and medium-sized enterprise turnover and employment in Finland. We find that these high-impact SMEs are unevenly distributed in Finland, as the majority are located in just four geographical regions. We also discover that high-impact SMEs as a rule have high ecosystem awareness, but low awareness of the benefit of shared platforms. This report offers a toolbox for the development and assessment of platform connections to boost the business ecosystem. It also recommends continued analysis of high-impact firms as a focus of internationalisation research.
... Nissan, for example, famously offered 87 different types of steering wheel for a single car model (Chandler and Williams, 1993). On the other hand, commonality can potentially lead to compromises in product quality (Erens, 1997). ...
Book
Full-text available
This report studies the role of high-impact firms in the Finnish business environment from an ecosystems perspective. We study six clusters of firms representing the creative, environmental, experience, health, ICT, and maritime sectors. Our research team identified 1,572 SMEs that met the criteria for high-impact firms, accounting for 5 percent of total small and medium-sized enterprise turnover and employment in Finland. We find that these high-impact SMEs are unevenly distributed in Finland, as the majority are located in just four geographical regions. We also discover that high-impact SMEs as a rule have high ecosystem awareness, but low awareness of the benefit of shared platforms. This report offers a toolbox for the development and assessment of platform connections to boost the business ecosystem. It also recommends continued analysis of high-impact firms as a focus of internationalisation research.
... A set of products that requires a customer to choose one variant and eventually one or several options is often called a products family (Agard, 2004; Callahan, 2006; O'Donnell et al., 1996; ElMaraghy et al., 2013; Erens, 1996; Jiao et al., 2007; Mtopi Fotso et al., 2009). Whereas Hsiao et al. (2013) prefer the name of modular product, it is frequent to come across terms that belong to the semantic field of the noun configuration, such as configurable product (Männistö et al., 2001; Tiihonen et al., 1998) and generic configuration (Izadpanah et al., 2009). ...
Article
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Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a strategic product-centric, lifecycle-oriented and information-driven business approach that strives to integrate people and their inherent practices, processes, and technologies, both within and across functional areas of the extended enterprise from inception to disposal. The integration of people relies on the harmonisation of domain-specific glossaries by standardising a universal PLM vocabulary. So far, unfortunately, there is no PLM standard vocabulary. Therefore, the tremendous amount of knowledge that is continually brought forward by academic research studies, industrial practices and computer-aided applications causes semantic ambiguities. This paper consists of an illustrated glossary and a conceptual map. The glossary identifies, discusses, clarifies and illustrates ambiguous terms used in discrete manufacturing. The conceptual map finally underlines the logical flow of refereed definitions.