Developing modular product family using GeMoCURE within an SME

Companies adopt the strategy of producing variety of products to be competitive and responsive to market. Product variation is becoming an important factor in companies' ability to accurately meet customer requirements. Ever increasing consumer options mean that customers have more choices than ever before which put commercial pressures on companies to continue to diversify. This can be a particular problem within Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) who do not always have the level of resources to meet these requirements. As such, methods are required that provide means for companies to be able to produce a wide range of products at the lowest cost and shortest time. This paper details a new modular product design methodology that provides a focus on developing modular product families. The methodology's function is described and a case study detailed of how it was used within an SME to define the company's product portfolio and create a new Generic Product Function Structure from which a new family of product variants can be developed. The methodology lends itself to modular re-use which has the potential to support rapid development and configuration of product variants

Developing and applying an integrated modular design methodology within a SME

Modularity within a product can bring advantages to the design process by facilitating enhanced design reuse, reduced lead times, decreased cost and higher levels of quality. While the benefits of modularity are becoming increasingly better known, at present it is usually left to the designers themselves to introduce modularity into products. Studies into modularity have shown that byimplementing 'formal' methods, further benefits can be made in terms of time, cost, quality and performance. Current approaches that have been proposed for the formal development of modular design methodologies fail to accurately represent knowledge that is inherently produced during design projects and fail to consider design from the different viewpoints of the development process. This work, built on previous work on modularity and design for reuse, aims to develop an integrated design methodology that will optimise the modules created through the design process and allow for modularity to be 'built-in' to product development from the initial stages. The methodology andassociated tools have been developed to provide an easy-to-use approach to modularity that has support for design rationales and company knowledge that aid in effective design decision making. The methodology, named GeMoCURE, provides an integrated total solution to modular design based on reuse of proven physical and knowledge modules. Its incremental nature allows for the optimalstructure to be maintained as the design progresses. A special focus has been on the application of this approach for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs), which are typically challenged by a lack of design human resources and expertise

Types of partly configurable products in high-variety, low-volume context

Research on partly configurable products is emerging. Key concepts of these types of products have been scarcely synthetized, as definitions of partly configurable products in high-variety, low-volume industrial context are limited. These products incorporate modular and integral designs, which calls for an overview on the relations of key concepts defining them. The problem is approached through an exploratory literature review, which allowed an overview of the key concepts over product modularity and partly configurable products. Those were synthetized further define partly configurable products. As a result, four types of partly configurable products are given. This review supports vantage over the key concepts and their relations for reuse with partly configurable products in academia. For practitioners the presented attributes and given examples support in understanding of concepts and their relations with partly configurable products.Peer reviewe

Design space exploration using multi-instance modelling and its application for SMEs

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