PRODUCT FAMILY DESIGN FROM A MANUFACTURING POINT OF VIEW

Highly competitive global markets force companies to change their way of doing business. A major trend designing product families is an increased interest in using product platforms, to increase the reuse in the design processes and of components. Product platform is well established for configurable products, but not in the same degree for nonconfigurable products. To change a product family over to a product platforms design there is a need to visualise and understand the evolution of the existing products. This article present a model to visualise the evolution of a nonconfigurable product family, based upon the industrial processes. It also discusses how the launch of industrial processes affects the organisation resources.