Component Commonality: the p-Median solution to a product design problem

International audienceComponent commonality is an important problem that permeates the manufacturing industry. Serving multiple members of a product family with a single component design reduces the amount of different SKUs one has to manage with reduced inventory cost, allows achieving high service level, but introduce inefficiencies. As it is common in supply chain management, making the right trade-offs allows the decision maker to better manage the supply chain in terms of efficiency and responsiveness. We present a model for analyzing this trade-off that has an underlying structure of a p-Median problem