Study On Development And Design Of Product Family For Mass Customization

The application of Mass Customization (MC) comes into being competitive advantage for enterprise since 1990's. This production model not only could be satisfied with the individual needs of customer, but also keep product with the low cost and the short delivery time at same time. MC caters for trend of needs in market. Now many enterprises in society are paying attention to it widely because of its advantage. So paper chooses the study on development and design of product family for MC. The paper mainly discusses some problems as follows:Firstly, the paper summarizes the research background, and points out the inevitability of MC developing. Then the paper introduces the characteristics and sorts of MC, and makes sure the domain of study.Secondly, the paper describes the whole process of development, the course of product family design, and some correlative supported technologies on product for MC. Then the paper points the analysis of customer's needs and the design of product family is keys in applying MC successfully.Thirdly, the paper describes the process of analyzing customer's needs on the basis of integrating design and management activity, and links customer's demands of function and parameters of engineering design into the uniform communication domain by fuzzy theory. Then the paper classifies customer's demands by Affinity Diagram in order to model product family.Fourthly, the paper discusses modeling and architecture of product family from three points of view. There are function view, structure view and technology view. Then the paper points out the process of shaping custom-built product, optimizing custom-built product, and discusses how to form the main cost of custom-built product by the way of Case Base on Reasoning (CBR). Fifthly, the paper discusses how to obtain common platform by the similar coefficients of geometry shape, materials, manufacturing process and function on the basis of explaining information between product structure and module.Lastly, a case of company T was presented using the above method.The result of demonstration research indicates that the development and design of product family on common product platform could reduce cost, raise quality of product and respond rapidly the individual needs of customers. It is definite sense for product development and design in enterprise because the way of customizing product has gradually been popular in today.