Assessment of commonality in products and processes for a product family

Many companies use commonality indices as surrogate measures to assess the economies of scale in their design and manufacturing operations. However, the computation of commonality indices during the early design stages and identification of common resources consumed during the product realization process is not adequately addressed in the literature. In the present study, four commonality indices have been developed -- two design commonality indices and two resource commonality indices at conceptual and structural stages of product design and product manufacture, respectively. Two weighting factors, namely, cost and demand have also been taken into account while computing these indices. These indices provide insight to the designers and product roadmap developers about design elements shared by different product variants. The conceptual and structural architecture commonality indices, namely, the Conceptual Architecture Commonality Index (CACJ), and the Structural Architecture Commonality Index (SAC/) are computed based on an attribute ranking scale. Nine attributes have been identified, each at the conceptual and the structural architecture level, respectively. The resource commonality index is computed based on a set of processes. Conceptual processes are considered for the computation of Conceptual Resource Commonality Index (RCIc), while manufacturing processes are considered for the computation of Structural Resource Commonality Index (RCIs). The proposed methodology has been explained using an illustrative example of a family of Color Picture Tubes (CPTs) --Abstract, page iv