Autor: Sandra Eilmus

Megatrends of globalisation and individualisation characterize global markets. Hence, varying individual customer needs need to be satisfied and products need to be compliant with country-specific conditions while maintaining marketable prices. Offering a broad variety of products cost-efficiently, becomes a crucial success-factor. Yet, a broad variety of products leads to more complexity, causing more costs. These complexity costs incur for instance because of higher storage expenses, excessive logistics and smaller lot sizes. By developing modular product families, product variants can be configured from a small number of modules in order to reduce complexity. The modular design enables the use of common components in several product variants, so called commonality. In recent decades, several approaches have been developed to increase the commonality of product families, among others the Integrated PKT-Approach for Developing Modular Product Families. Still, additional potential can be exploited by using common modules even across product families. As there are no sufficient methods for a product program wide approach yet, the aim of this contribution is to develop methodical support for the development of common product programs. This method includes the Carryover Chart (CoC), a newly developed visualisation of product programs regarding their carryover modules. At first potential carryover candidates are identified using the CoC. Analysing this potential as well as the actual needs for more commonality or more differentiation, a product program specific product structure strategy is developed. In accordance with this strategy the carryover candidates are developed as modules with common use across product families. This phase includes design for variety in order to achieve higher component commonality. The effect of higher component and module commonality on the product life phases is evaluated and optimized. These steps are supported by partly existing and adapted method units of the Integrated PKT-Approach. Resulting concepts are compared in a newly developed breakeven-analysis in order to understand the effect on production and complexity cost. Applying the method on a product program of fork lift trucks and the design of base frames it is successfully evaluated. The Integrated PKT-Approach for Developing Modular Product families is extended by the new method to the Integrated PKT-Approach for Developing Modular Product Programs.