Analysis of Impacts of Product Family Architecture on the Competitive Advantage of Product Family

Competitive advantage of product family is the advantage that product family brings more profits or benefits than other products. Through mass customization,product family achieves advantage of scale that neither mass production nor single product can do. After describing the process of product family architecting,pyramid structure of product architecture is proposed and the factors that impact product family architecture are analyzed. Based on the analysis of competitive advantage,the competitive advantage of product family can be subdivided into advantage of scale and advantage of customization. An analysis model is built to describe the impact of product family architecture,market,supply chain,technical capabilities of enterprise,and manufacturing capabilities of enterprise on competitive advantage of product family.