Measuring Shape Commonality

The current market has become customer driven and heterogeneous, and these shifts in the market have caused companies the additional problem of providing greater variety with existing challenges of providing greater quality, competitive pricing, and greater speed to market. Many companies are moving towards a platform approach to address the challenges posed by the market, which requires aggregation of the existing varieties to design and develop common platforms. Product platform aggregation is a bottom-up approach that focuses on development of a common platform for an existing family (see Chapter 1). In a given product family, each product will have a basic/core function in combination with a unique set of functions to appeal to the targeted market segments (Kota, et al., 2000; Kota and Sethuraman, 1998). Consequently, one of the important questions that need to be addressed is “What is common among the different products of the family?” A key factor to answer this questionis measuring commonality of components across the product family to identify common components that have the potential to be included in the platform for the family.