ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT An important part of product variety management is finding the optimum variety extent. Usually, the product variety extent is limited by, for example, production capabilities and/or production capacities, among other restrictions. This chapter intends to show that the product variety extent can also be influenced by configuration conflicts. Making decisions about product configurations is part of standard product architecture development activity. Producers need to deliver variants to address the diversity of consumer needs. However, when configuration conflicts occur, the question is how they will be perceived by customers. Here, we propose an analytical method to be used in decisions about the elimination or retainment
7.1 Introduction ........................................................................................... 144 7.2 Entropy-based complexity metrics for product variety extent ...... 145
7.2.1 Theoretical background ........................................................... 145 7.2.2 Methodical approach to enumerating product
configurations and waste entropy .......................................... 147 7.2.2.1 Enumeration of product configurations with
and without restrictions ............................................ 149 7.2.2.2 Proposed procedure to reduce waste entropy ....... 152
7.3 Decision-making algorithm ................................................................ 154 7.4 Practical case application ..................................................................... 155 7.5 Concluding remarks ............................................................................. 159 References .........................................................................................................161 Appendix 7.1 ....................................................................................................162 Appendix 7.2 ................................................................................................... 163 Appendix 7.3 ................................................................................................... 164
of configuration conflicts. This method will be verified through a realistic case where alternative product design platforms are compared. The newly developed method can be employed to assist product managers to independently assess competitive product variety platforms against each other.
