一种评价产品族通用性的方法:通用一性能指标

许多企业在开发产品族时都面临这样一个挑战:必须推出多样产品来满足不同客户的需求,同时又不能付出太多额外的成本,即,它们必须使产品在消费者眼中尽可能的不同,而在设计、制造过程又尽可能的相同。换言之,企业必须处理好产品族中通用性与差异性间的平衡问题:通用性过高会降低产品性能,同时各产品缺乏个性而使消费者不满;通用性过低又会增加生产成本。产品间设计技术、零部件、制造设备等的通用可以为企业带来许多益处,如缩短研发时间、降低开发风险、减少零部件库存和零部件管理成本、降低生产线复杂度、提高生产能力3]等。然而,过高的通用性又会阻碍企业创新、降低产品性能。为了评价产品族通用性的高低,不少学者提出了各自的通用性评价指标,这些指标被用来对产品族进行数值化的评价。本文介绍了6种评价指标,并对它们进行了比较和总结,最后提出了一种新的评价指标:通用-性能指标。

A Method to Evaluate Product Family Commonality： Common-Performance Index

Many manufacturing companies are faced with such a challenge：they must as much varity as possible for the market while keeping cost low, ie, they must make their products seemed variant in customers＇ views while as same as possible in design and processing.in another word, they must resolve the tradeoff between product commonality and distinctiveness：if commonality is too high, products＇ individual performance is not optimized, and due to products lack distinctiveness, customers will not like the company;on the contrary, if commonality is too low, manufacturing costs can increase substantiall~ll.Commonality has many advantages beyond improving economies of scale：decreased inventory and research risks, handling costs and processing time;reduced product line complexity, set-up and retooling time, and increased productivity .However, too much commonality within a product family can hinder innovation and creativity and even compromise product performance. In order to evaluate the commonality extent of a product family, many reseachers present their index to calculate commonality mathimatically.This article introduces 6 of them, gives their merits and limitations, and presents a new method to evaluate commonality：the common-performance index.