Product design and manufacturing system operations: An integrated approach for product customization

To stay competitive in the marketplace, manufacturing firms that rely on high product variety should involve the customer in the product design process. However, customer interaction with the product at the design level could compromise the product functionality and the operational arrangement of the manufacturing system. To address these challenges, we aim to align the preferences of the design and manufacturing teams within a manufacturing firm in the context of mass customization. The preference of the design team is in terms of product modularity, associated with product upgradeability and flexibility. In the manufacturing team, complexity is a preference associated with cost and quality. In our research, the motivation for selecting these attributes is that product modularity is used to deal with product variety, and complexity is related to the uncertainty of product manufacturing. These two perspectives could support the manufacturing firm decision of selecting which product architecture is more convenient for a given operational arrangement and vice versa. We use a Multi-Attribute Utility function to assess the preferences of the design and manufacturing teams in terms of modularity and manufacturing complexity. We analyze the functional requirements of the product and then their mapping into the product architecture. Finally, we study the relationship of the product components to the operational arrangement of the manufacturing system. In addition, we include a case study in which we analyze two products and their relationship to a single manufacturing system, where the highest utility produces the best relationship between product design and manufacturing configuration complexity. By using this integrated approach, a manufacturer can decide to update the product design, the related operational configuration, or both.