With the growing competition in business, satisfying customers' individual requirements has turned into a competitive edge. In response to diversified customer needs, product variety has become a common phenomenon. However, product variety presents manufacturers with challenges in terms of how to plan, design, manage and fulfill it, i.e. how to deal with the processes necessary to achieve product variety. To handle these challenges, a prerequisite is to systematically characterize and represent variety knowledge including product variety, process variety and variety relationships that explain how product variety impacts processes and vice versa....[ Read more ]

With the growing competition in business, satisfying customers' individual requirements has turned into a competitive edge. In response to diversified customer needs, product variety has become a common phenomenon. However, product variety presents manufacturers with challenges in terms of how to plan, design, manage and fulfill it, i.e. how to deal with the processes necessary to achieve product variety. To handle these challenges, a prerequisite is to systematically characterize and represent variety knowledge including product variety, process variety and variety relationships that explain how product variety impacts processes and vice versa.

Numerous works of research have been reported to characterize and represent product variety, but few have addressed process variety and variety relationships. This research fills in the gap. First, a Generic Product Model is developed based on the classical Generic-Bills-Of-Materials (GBOM), complementing parametrical product variety in GBOM with structural product variety. Second, a Generic Process Model is developed by applying similar concepts of hierarchy, entities and relationships to the process domain. Operational and sequential process varieties are identified. Based on the two generic models, a mapping mechanism is developed to explore variety relationships. Unified Modeling Language is selected as the representation language.

Meanwhile, an innovative approach is developed to study the variety impacts based on variety knowledge, exemplified by assessing cost implications of a custom-made product. Through focusing on the variety part in product and process domains, the approach is able to save tremendous time and effort in the high variety environment, compared with the prevailing Activity-Based Costing approach . Moreover, the result reveals explicit relationships between variety attributes and costs, which are useful for manufacturers to negotiate with customers and to improve product and/or process designs in order to achieve cost effectiveness in offering product variety.

Industrial case studies are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and potentials of the approaches.