The Study On Collaborative Product Development Based On Product Platform

With the formation of world market, the competition between enterprises have focused on how to satisfy the individual client's demands better and manufacture individually based on client's demands without impairing enterprises' benefits. This is mass customization, which has become the new competitive pattern between enterprises in the new century.In the mean time, many product developers put forward the concept of product platform and product family to satisfy client's demands of wide scope effectively, in order to supply more diversiform products to markets with little difference. The achievements of product platform strategy application have attracted the attention of theorists. Compared with the strategy of developing a product at one time, product family development strategy based on product platform adapts to the product mode of mass customization, and is better.Formation of world buyers' market and products' more frequent update draw manufacturers' attention to the process of product development and design, because nice process will cut down product development time enormously. Constructing the collaborative product development model based on product platform is significant.Firstly, this paper expounds the research backgrounds, then investigates and analyses the development and trend of product R&D, the evolvement of collaborative product development ideas, the research and application status of collaborative product development, the means of collaborative product development, the academic and applied researches of product platform and product family theory and so on, brings forward the research contents and routes of collaborative product development model based on product platform. Secondly, it puts forward the increased degrees' collaborative product development model and explains the essential meaning of increased degrees' collaborative product development.Thirdly, it presents the meanings of product platform and product family, and discusses how to constitute and manage the product platform strategy.Fourthly, it sets up a new kind of method to design product platform, and introduces the basic principles and organizational modes of managing product platform development, and talks over managing product platform development procession, then explores detailedly on how to manage the interface between subsystems in course of new product development by use of two examples of electric tool product family development.Fifthly, it provides a modular product-architectures approach to generate and architect a product family that shares inter-changeable modules. An example of VTM showing the application of this method to the design of a family of electric tool has been presented.At the end, it presents an approach for the design and selection of products based on decision analysis and real option concept. This method allows designers to quantify the value of alternative product families and select the ones that are more valuable to the firm. An application to the design and evaluation of platform-based family of electric tool from a firm is shown.