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 Based on longtime experience in the global automotive industry, we have observed steadily higher expectations in the execution of product development projects regarding time, budget and quality. This is particularly challenging when different stakeholders, including customers, design, manufacturing and suppliers, impose changes to the agreed product content late in the project. This paper addresses commodity-driven automotive projects and the impact of externally and internally driven changes in the project content-which we denote 'newness'-on performance outcomes. Aiming to falsify our initial hypothesis that such newness in project content during new product development will have negative impact on project outcomes, we examine data from Norwegian companies obtained by surveying their experience with project outcomes relative to imposed changes in content. The participants were asked about the different level of innovation and project specific circumstances perceived forming the basis for successful and unsuccessful project outcomes. The data show a significant positive correlation between newness and unsuccessful project outcomes, whose underlying factors are examined and discussed further in the paper. Abstract Based on longtime experience in the global automotive industry, we have observed steadily higher expectations in the execution of product development projects regarding time, budget and quality. This is particularly challenging when different stakeholders, including customers, design, manufacturing and suppliers, impose changes to the agreed product content late in the project. This paper addresses commodity-driven automotive projects and the impact of externally and internally driven changes in the project content-which we denote 'newness'-on performance outcomes. Aiming to falsify our initial hypothesis that such newness in project content during new product development will have negative impact on project outcomes, we examine data from Norwegian companies obtained by surveying their experience with project outcomes relative to imposed changes in content. The participants were asked about the different level of innovation and project specific circumstances perceived forming the basis for successful and unsuccessful project outcomes. The data show a significant positive correlation between newness and unsuccessful project outcomes, whose underlying factors are examined and discussed further in the paper.