Integrated Development of Modular Product Families: A Methods Toolkit

An integrated approach for developing modular product families was developed at the PKT Institute to create individualized products for globally marketable prices. The integrated PKT-approach for developing modular product families aims to generate maximum external product variety, using the lowest possible internal process and component variety. Based on existing methods for reducing internal variety, the approach provides a toolkit of combinable method units. Tailored support is provided by this toolkit for specific needs and situations of companies facing the challenge of reducing internal variety. Several industrial case studies demonstrate how the use of one method unit or the combination of several method units supports the development of modular product families during specific corporate challenges and aims. The first section describes the challenges being addressed by the integrated PKT-approach. A survey of research fields dealing with these challenges is presented in the second section. A product family example is presented to demonstrate the state-of-the-art methods and the method units from the integrated PKT-approach. Their application in industrial projects is shown in Sect. 10.7, which is followed by the future prospects for enhancing the integrated PKT-approach.

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