Integrated Portfolio Management of Product and Production Systems

As a response to the ever-increasing demand for more customized products at lower costs and of higher quality, product developers have adapted the “system thinking” and developed modular and platform-based product architectures. This is done to increase the external variety in the product portfolio offered to the customer whilst not increasing the internal complexity in the manufacturing system. In resent years the manufacturing system developers have adopted this way of thinking and the phenomenon of co-platforming emerged. Therefore, as both the product portfolio and the manufacturing system portfolio in the future will consist of modules and platform-based architectures it is believed that it is possible to create an integrated portfolio of modular and platform-based product and manufacturing system architectures. When an integrated portfolio is created it is expected to be possible to harvest the benefits of modularization across the companies entire portfolio using a full cost approach.