Design principles for an integrated product and process development approach for rotationally symmetric products

Highly customized products lead to irreproducible complexity in product development and manufacturing. Additionally order processing becomes very complex. Today´s product design and IT-tools reduce this complexity insufficiently. Potentials in administration and manufacturing are not fully in line. Most of the relevant approaches for designing products focus on the product without considering interactions with manufacturing. Approaches within concurrent engineering predominantly support optimization of single components rather than modular product platforms. The presented approach develops constituent features by setting product and manufacturing-process standards for modular product platforms. These constituent features describe product characteristics that have a critical impact on product and manufacturing complexity. These features don´t affected customer demands and therefore can be standardized. The key factor to derive constituent features is to quantify the variance-sensitivity of product features. Variance-sensitivity is a measure of the costs required to produce product variance. Hence highly diverse variance-sensitive features lead to additional expenses in manufacturing-processes. The aim of this paper is to develop an approach to statistically quantify the variance-sensitivity in order to set constituent features for rotational symmetric products. Knowledge of the influence between product features and manufacturing-process enables companies to offer customized products with cost-effective manufacturing-processes. This technological and production-related flexibility is essential for the growing needs of global markets.