Incentivizing commonality: An evaluation of the benefit and cost impact of platforming strategies

Commonality strategies have become an important means of cost-sharing across systems. However, decreases in realized commonality have important implications for the cost-sharing effects of commonality. We review the spectrum of benefits provided under different commonality strategies, with a view to determining how these benefits scale - whether by number of variants, total production volume, or by production share, etc. Building on these benefits, we construct a framework for evaluating incentives for commonality. We explore a number of incentive structures, such as allocating commonality investment among variants. We find that each structure has advantages and disadvantages, and we hypothesize that appropriately representing savings will be a more robust policy than artificially inflating non-common parts prices. These findings have important implications for the design of Aerospace product families. In addition to the technical and organizational coordination required to execute commonality, program managers need to be aware of the underlying bias of cost incentives in play during development and production.