Sustainability of modular product families

A global customer base demanding highly individual products often forces companies to offer a wide range of products. Commonality within modular product families allows great product variety through lower internal variety of components and processes. Companies then struggle with sustainability of modular product families, that is, managing commonality across the product family lifecycle when modular product families are changed to react to new customer demands. Based on a literature review, the current support from academia for handling the sustainability of modular product families is presented. The findings are consolidated into a conceptual schema. The subsequent successful use of the conceptual schema in the process planning of a medium-sized enterprise, developing and producing elevators, identified further factors that influence the sustainability of modular product families. These factors will be addressed in the future, with support from academia.

Subjects

Design management

Engineering change

Product families

Product structuring

Options

Sustainability of modular product families