Study And Application On Equipment Products Configuration Management For Mass Customization

Market competition and the increasing diversity of user needs make the current focus of the manufacturing sector shifted from mass production to mass customization. Mass customization is an advanced production mode in 21St century that combines two opposite patterns, customization production and mass production, together. It keeps low production cost and fast delivery time, while meeting individual customers' needs. In the equipment manufacturing enterprises, product design in the company mainly roots in clients'order and the product is often produced singly. It not only requests engineer complete the product configuration accord with the requirement of the order, but also needs the assurance of product quality in one-off production, and, where possible, reduces the cost of the product. Now enterprises eagerly need a method to sustain them to develop new product from a foundation product, so they can assemble some new products based on some foundation product and combined some parts'difference which derived from the product modification design process. When the parts are too many, the performance differences are too bigger, and the series products parts are borrowed frequently. How can enterprises superiorly combine different products to satisfy different market fastly is the most pressing problem for the equipment manufacturing enterprises to resolve. Variable product family configuration management is a form of product data organization and management. Proper method of product family configuration management can manage the huge number of product variants, and decrease the difficulty of implementing MC. In this paper, a method to support the variable-based product family configuration management for the equipment manufacturing enterprises and its computer realization are studied mainly.The paper takes the enterprise which produced building materials gear box, water and electricity gear box, nuclear power and wind power gear box, propeller yaw change speed boxes and high-precision automotive engine gears as an example to describes the characteristics of equipment products design and manufacturing. Through the gear box product series and modular analysis, this paper proposes the establishment of dynamic model of product family for the product structure configuration approach. Through the establishment of the basis of library materials and the method of the rule-based product configuration to achieve quick configuration. a method of mono-tier BOM based product family configuration management to solve the data redundancy is illustrated. The application research is based on the project of PDM system application in CC Company. The theory and method of product configuration based on case come true in the software, and be applied practically in the company.