MATRIX BASED METHOD FOR MAINTAINING CONFIGURATION KNOWLEDGE
DS 49: Proceedings of NordDesign 2004 Conference, Tampere, Finland, 18.-20.08.2004
Year: 2004
Editor: Lehtonen, Timo; Pulkkinen, Antti and Riitahuhta, Asko
Author: Nummela, J.
Page(s): 299 - 308
Abstract
Increasing needs of the customers require the companies to develop product families with enough variants to be able to stay in business and keep the customers satisfied. The need for increasing variants of products, require a systematic way of maintaining the modular product structures in order to generate the configuration knowledge necessary. This paper presents a method for maintaining the configuration rules, both for marketing and production simultaneously, and presents the concept of configuration matrices as part of the integrating factor of the company. The main purpose of this research is to build a method lu enable a systematic configuration process by establishing the configuration models for the products. Next to the configuration process the configuration knowledge can be used to analyze the state of the product structure, active components and modules, and topics related to product lifecycle and operations management.
Keywords: Modularity, configuration knowledge, configurability. Configuration matrices, configuration rules