Product development methodology "scalability"

Carolina Gracia Grijota, Raquel Acero, José Antonio Yagüe-Fabra
2021 Procedia CIRP  
In today's business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbroken. Due to this development, the need of agile and reconfigurable production systems emerged to cope with various products and product families. To design and optimize production systems as well as to choose the optimal product matches, product analysis methods are needed. Indeed, most of the known methods aim to analyze a product or one product family on the physical level. Different product
more » ... ies, however, may differ largely in terms of the number and nature of components. This fact impedes an efficient comparison and choice of appropriate product family combinations for the production system. A new methodology is proposed to analyze existing products in view of their functional and physical architecture. The aim is to cluster these products in new assembly oriented product families for the optimization of existing assembly lines and the creation of future reconfigurable assembly systems. Based on Datum Flow Chain, the physical structure of the products is analyzed. Functional subassemblies are identified, and a functional analysis is performed. Moreover, a hybrid functional and physical architecture graph (HyFPAG) is the output which depicts the similarity between product families by providing design support to both, production system planners and product designers. An illustrative example of a nail-clipper is used to explain the proposed methodology. An industrial case study on two product families of steering columns of thyssenkrupp Presta France is then carried out to give a first industrial evaluation of the proposed approach. Abstract In industrial manufacturing environments, where production requires a detailed product development, delivery times to customer are highly affected by the time required for development. Usually, product development takes long before arriving to the final solution Therefore, an improvement of the product development process can imply a very high potential in reducing the product delivery time to customer. This paper outlines a new product development methodology, based on the foundations of collaborative design and lean and agile methodologies. For that, we analyze and optimize the value stream of the product engineering process flow in a company of the sector of design, manufacturing, and commercialization of equipment in retail, through lean tools, to implement the "product scalability" concept. The case study shows a reduction of the product development lead time around 10-20%, regarding the present process, in the pilot tests conducted. Consequently, product development methodology "scalability" could have an enormous potential in reducing lead time and product development cost, in sectors with similar characteristics in terms of number of product variants and life cycles than the development of furniture and equipment for retail sector. Abstract In industrial manufacturing environments, where production requires a detailed product development, delivery times to customer are highly affected by the time required for development. Usually, product development takes long before arriving to the final solution Therefore, an improvement of the product development process can imply a very high potential in reducing the product delivery time to customer. This paper outlines a new product development methodology, based on the foundations of collaborative design and lean and agile methodologies. For that, we analyze and optimize the value stream of the product engineering process flow in a company of the sector of design, manufacturing, and commercialization of equipment in retail, through lean tools, to implement the "product scalability" concept. The case study shows a reduction of the product development lead time around 10-20%, regarding the present process, in the pilot tests conducted. Consequently, product development methodology "scalability" could have an enormous potential in reducing lead time and product development cost, in sectors with similar characteristics in terms of number of product variants and life cycles than the development of furniture and equipment for retail sector.
doi:10.1016/j.procir.2021.05.125 fatcat:wkq2gu4gira4dakuxissrlo7rq