Agenda: 

6:00-6:30 PM: Meet, Greet, and Mingle 

   Local Introductions at Local Sites

   Order/Obtain Food and Drinks

6:30-7:00 PM: Chapter Business

7:00-7:45 PM: Invited Speaker: Dr. Srivastava, MIT

7:45-8:00 PM: Discussion and Wrap-Up

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Title: Product Family and Product Platform Benchmarking and Redesign

 

Bio: Dr. Simpson is the Paul Morrow Professor of Engineering Design and Manufacturing at Penn State with affiliate appointments in Architecture and Information Sciences & Technology.  He serves as the co-Director of CIMP-3D (www.cimp-3d.org) and oversees the world’s first graduate program in Additive Manufacturing & Design.  He has been PI or Co-PI on over $25M in funding for his research in product family and product platform design, additive manufacturing and 3D printing, and multidisciplinary design optimization and trade space visualization.  He has published over 300 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and he is the lead editor on two books on product family design, Product Platform and Product Family Design: Methods & Applications and Advances in Product Family and Product Platform Design: Methods & Applications.  He has collaborated on platforming projects with more than 40 companies, and his short course on product family design that he co-teaches at MIT has engaged over 300 industry practitioners to date.  He has received numerous awards for outstanding research and teaching at Penn State, including the 2007 Penn State President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration.  He is a recipient of the ASME Design Automation Award, Robert E. Abbott Award, and Ben C. Sparks Award as well as the ASEE Fred Merryfield Design Award.  He is a Fellow in ASME and an Associate Fellow in AIAA, and he chairs the ASME Design, Manufacturing, and Materials Segment Leadership Team.  He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell.  

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Abstract: As companies are pressured to reduce costs and lead-times while increasing variety for the global marketplace, the need to design products based on common platform “elements” is growing.  Product family design has become an effective strategy to meet this challenge, but companies still struggle with assessing how “good” their product family is and redesigning platform “elements” to be effective in the marketplace.  Companies routinely benchmark individual products, but they struggle with how to benchmark their product families and associated platform “elements” against competitive offerings.  This talk will discuss a novel approach for product family benchmarking and redesign that uses commonality and variety indices to compare competing product families and associated platform “elements”.  In particular, the Product Line Commonality Index (PCI) is used to evaluate the commonality within the family while the Generational Variety Index (GVI) is used to evaluate the variety needed for the marketplace.  Plotting the two in a Commonality-Variety Tradeoff Chart enables a company to assess how well components, modules, and platform “elements” are properly platformed, causing confusion in the marketplace, or undervalued in their uniqueness.  Several examples are discussed to illustrate the approach and its implications.  The limitations of the approach are also discussed along with avenues for future work.