Component sharing methodologies in product development: A review

Challenges and Competition faced by manufacturing industries are immense. Manufacturing companies are under tremendous pressure to manufacture components with limited resources, money and time. Component sharing strategies have gained a lot of importance over the last decade to solve these multitudes of objectives especially in industries where a lot of components are to be manufactured/assembled to build a desired final product (like an automobile or telecommunication product). Various approaches of obtaining an optimum component sharing mechanism have been adopted over the years considering the design, manufacturability and marketability aspects of a product. Different commonality indices have also been developed, as a result, to arrive at the measure of commonality in the design of a family of products considering many of the above mentioned aspects. This paper aims at critically reviewing the key literature in each of these areas thereby providing a comprehensive summary of the available approaches in arriving at the optimal commonality design. Towards the end, the paper also gives an insight into other aspects that can be considered for future research like developing a comprehensive commonality metric which encompasses sustainability and emphasizes the need to include product lifecycle demand aspects in the design phase.

Component sharing methodologies in product development: A review Conference Paper