Identifying Platform Candidates in the Process Industry: A Proposal for a Practitioner-Oriented Method

Manufacturing companies are increasingly pressured by various market changes across both discrete manufacturing and process manufacturing industries. This has forced manufacturers to adopt more efficient product development approaches to deliver the required product variety in a cost-efficient manner. In discrete manufacturing industry, platform-based methods have been successfully applied at scale to solve this issue while the process industry is lacking behind. With outset in the unique characteristics of process industry products, platform development methods from discrete manufacturing industry are reviewed and it is found that none of these sufficiently accommodate the needs of process industry products such as accounting for production sequence constraints or the inability to disassemble process industry products. To accommodate these needs, a method for identifying product platform candidates in the process industry is proposed including a novel algorithm to assist in this endeavor. The method is comprised of two phases and seven comprising steps from initial delimitation of product families to the final review and selection of feasible product platform candidates. The method allows practitioners to first identify the most relevant product family to implement product platforms and identifies potentially relevant product platform candidates, enabling process industry manufacturers to adopt platform-based product development approaches.