Commonality and Product Design

149 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998.The challenge that manufacturing firms face today is that global markets demand frequent product innovation and extensive product diversification simultaneously. Considerable product development cost and a lack of long lasting and profitable product designs mandate companies to take a systematic and integrated approach to the design of product families and of successive product generations. Modularity/commonality has emerged as a powerful option in product design to provide customers with a variety of products at reduced costs. While traditional research has mainly focused on cost side effects of commonality, this dissertation provides a novel insight on the demand side effect of commonality and integrates it with the cost side effect of commonality. We suggest a notion of customers' valuation change due to commonality and demonstrate the effect of the valuation change on optimal product design through an analytic approach. We also empirically test the effect of commonality in product design on customers' valuation of products and show that the notion of valuation change prevails for a wide range of products. In the last part of dissertation, we consider a multi-attribute product design problem and provide a measure of customers' multi-dimensional preference and properties of the optimal solution.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD