In today's market, companies are faced with pressure to increase variety in product offerings. While increasing variety can help increase market share and sales growth, the costs of doing so can be significant. Ultimately, variety causes complexity in products and processes to soar, which negatively impacts product development, quality, production scheduling, efficiency and more. Product variety is just one common cause of product complexity, a topic that several researchers have tackled with several sources of product complexity now identified. However, even with such progress, product complexity continues to be a theoretical concept, making it difficult for companies to fully implement advances and fully manage product complexity. More and more companies are relying on product family design to handle product variety. Broadly, a product family can be defined as a group of products sharing common elements. The advantages for companies using product family strategies can be significant: they enable efficient derivation of product variants, reduce inventory and handling costs, as well as setup and retooling time. The design challenge however, is to select the product platform to generate a variety of products with minimum deviation from individual requirements. Accordingly, the structure of product families makes designing and evaluating them a challenging process. In order to fully embrace the relationships between variety, product complexity, and product families an understanding of product complexity causes and impacts is essential. This research begins by introducing four main dimensions of product complexity within the context of a generalized definition. Product complexity indicators suitable in product design, development and production are derived. By establishing measurements for the identified indicators and using clustering techniques, a complexity evaluation approach for product family designs is also developed in this research. The evaluation approach is also applied on a component basis, to identify Critical Components that are main sources and contributors of complexity within product families. By standardizing identified Critical Components, product complexity levels and associated costs can be managed. A case application of three product families from a tire manufacturing company is used to verify that this research approach is suitable for evaluating and managing product complexity in product families. / Ph. D.

Modular product architecture is characterized by the existence of standardized interfaces between the physical building blocks. A module is a collection of technical solutions that perform a function, with interfaces selected for company-specific strategic reasons. Approaches to modularity are the structured methods by which modular product architectures are derived. The approaches include Modular Function Deployment (MFD), Design Structure Matrix (DSM), Function Structure Heuristics and many other, including hybrids. The thesis includes a survey of relevant theory and a discussion of four challenges in product architecture research, detailed in the appended papers. One common experience from project work is structured methods such as DSM or MFD often do not yield fully conclusive results. This is usually because the algorithms used to generate modules do not have enough relevant data. Thus, we ask whether it is possible to introduce new data to make the output more conclusive. A case study is used to answer this question. The analysis indicates that with additional properties to capture product geometry, and flow of matter, energy, or information, the output is more conclusive. If product development projects even have an architecture definition phase, very little time is spent actually selecting the most suitable tool. Several academic models are available, but they use incompatible criteria, and do not capture experience-based or subjective criteria we may wish to include. The research question is whether we can define selection criteria objectively using academic models and experience-based criteria. The author gathers criteria from three academic models, adds experience criteria, performs a pairwise comparison of all available criteria and applies a hierarchical cluster analysis, with subsequent interpretation. The resulting evaluation model is tested on five approaches to modularity. Several conclusions are discussed. One is that of the five approaches studied, MFD and DSM have the most complementary sets of strengths and weaknesses, and that hybrids between these two fundamental approaches would be particularly interesting. The majority of all product development tries to improve existing products. A common criticism against all structured approaches to modularity is they work best for existing products. Is this perhaps a misconception? We ask whether MFD and DSM can be used on novel product types at an early phase of product development. MFD and DSM are applied to the hybrid drive train of a Forwarder. The output of the selected approaches is compared and reconciled, indicating that conclusions about a suitable modular architecture can be derived, even when many technical solutions are unknown. Among several conclusions, one is the electronic inverter must support several operating modes that depend on high-level properties of the drive train itself (such as whether regeneration is used). A modular structure for the electronic inverter is proposed. Module generation in MFD is usually done with Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA), where the results are presented in the form of a Dendrogram. Statistical software can generate a Dendrogram in a matter of seconds. For DSM, the situation is different. Most available algorithms require a fair amount of processing time. One popular algorithm, the Idicula-Gutierrez-Thebeau Algorithm (IGTA), requires a total time of a few hours for a problem of medium complexity (about 60 components). The research question is whether IGTA can be improved to execute faster, while maintaining or improving quality of output. Two algorithmic changes together reduce execution time required by a factor of seven to eight in the trials, and improve quality of output by about 15 percent. / QC 20120605

Industrial companies that carry on innovation and operation must have well-organized and capable business systems and processes. Customer needs, market demands, global competition and technological changes drive the companies to be more adaptable, flexible and dynamic. By working in network structures as extended enterprises, the companies face new possibilities and new challenges. Design, manufacturing and delivery of high quality products to competitive prices to the customers are essential for industrial companies. Holistic view of the product life cycle from technology development, via product and business system development and realization, to business operation, is important for sustainable industrial companies. A company with engineering and manufacturing of products in a business context needs to have effective innovation of business system and process. Business innovation encompasses the area from business idea to business operation and includes customer demands and solutions. The main part of business innovation is development of the product platform including product and support structures. Product variants are created and realized by various configurations of products and production systems. The thesis is elucidating that business innovation can be carried out by working in a systematic and structured way and by utilizing engineering design theories and methods. The business models, based on a new theory with a new navigation tool for interactions, are describing which activities should be performed in business innovation with product platform development and product structuring. For companies in business with changes, innovations can create new markets and products. Well-managed and innovative companies have good possibilities to be competitive in a tough business environment. The creation of business innovation models has been carried out according to a hermeneutic research method. The research work followed the hermeneutic circle or spiral. The thesis introduces a new dimension to the design area, namely business innovation or engineering, corresponding to business design and development. Business innovation is also a new type of innovation, combining technological, product, process, market and organizational innovations in industrial companies. / QC 20100920

In recent years, industrialised house building has gained shares on the Swedish house building market. The market demands for industrialised house building are exceeding the available supply of housing and experiencing a substantial increase in the housing production costs. For industrialised house building, the design has been identified as a critical phase with the systematization of the design a necessary part of industrialisation. Therefore, companies strive towards the inclusion of standardization and controlled processes in the design phase. Product platforms have proved to be related to the standardization of processes and products. Introducing a product platform approach in the design phase of house building could be a way to improve the design and ensure value creation in entire processes. Thus, the aim of this research is to outline means to support and improve the design phase of industrialised house building by using a product platform approach. A Swedish multi-storey house building company that uses glulam post and beam building system with a focus on platform development was used as the single case study in this research. The company intends to achieve increased efficiency by moving towards industrialized approaches. Empirical data were mainly gathered from interviews, observations, workshops, and document analysis. The findings present the existing challenges in the housing building industry and outlines twenty critical success factors that need to be considered in the design phase. Also, the result outlines support methods and tools that can be used for the improvement of the design phase when applying a product platform approach. Moreover, a flexible product platform can be developed with the support of parametric modelling and used to design building components having an engineer-to-order characteristic. Finally, the results show that a building system can be considered as part of a product platform in light of the necessity of an adequate support in the design process to maintain a sustainable platform. Thus, the contribution includes the addition of knowledge to platform theory in general and its application on the design phase of industrialised house building. / Under de senaste åren har det industriella husbyggandet tagit andelar på den svenska husbyggnadsmarknaden. Behovet av bostäder på marknaden överstiger tillgången och med ökning av bostadsproduktionskostnaderna som konsekvens. För det industriella husbyggandet har projekteringen identifierats som en avgörande fas och dess systematisering är en nödvändig för industrialiseringen. Som en följd strävar företag i segmentet efter att inkludera standardisering och kontrollerade processer i projekteringen. Produktplattformar har kunnat kopplas till standardisering av processer och produkter. Införandet av produktplattformar i projekteringen kan vara ett sätt att förbättra designen och säkra värdeskapandet igenom hela processen. Således är syftet i denna avhandling att ta fram medel för att stödja och förbättra projekteringen för industriellt husbyggande genom att tillämpa en ansats med produktplattformar. Ett svenskt byggnadsföretag med flera våningar som använder limträ- och balksystem med fokus på plattformsutveckling användes som en enda fallstudie i denna forskning. En fallstudie har genomförts på ett företag som bygger flervåningshus med ett pelar-balksystem i limträ med fokus på plattformsutveckling. Företaget har ambitionen att nå högre effektivitet genom att röra sig mot ett mer industriellt tillvägagångssätt. Data samlades in från intervjuer, observationer, workshops och dokumentanalyser. Resultaten visar vilka de befintliga utmaningarna är för husbyggandet och presenterar tjugo kritiska framgångsfaktorer som ska beaktas i projekteringen. Studien har även tagit fram supportmetoder och verktyg som kan användas för att förbättra projekteringen vid tillämpning av produktplattformar. Vidare, en flexibel produktplattform kan utvecklas med stöd av parametrisk modellering och användas för att projektera byggnads-komponenter med engineer-to-orderegenskaper. Slutligen, resultaten pekar mot att ett byggsystem kan betraktas som en del av en produktplattform ur perspektivet att tillräckligt med stöd i projekteringen krävs för att underhålla en hållbar plattform. Således, arbetet har bidragit med kunskap till teori om plattformar i allmänhet och dess tillämpning på projekteringen för industriellt husbyggande.