Design for variety: developing standardized and modularized product platform architectures

Developing a robust, product platform architecture brings an important competitive advantage to a company. The major benefits are reduced design effort and time-to-market for future generations of the product. This paper describes a step-by-step method that aids companies in developing such product platform architectures. Using the concept of specification ‘‘flows’’ within a product development project, the design for variety (DFV) method develops two indices to measure a product’s architecture. The first index is the generational variety index (GVI), a measure for the amount of redesign effort required for future designs of the product. The second index is the coupling index (CI), a measure of the coupling among the product components. The design team uses these two indices to develop a decoupled architecture that requires less design effort for follow-on products. This paper describes the DFV method and uses a water cooler example to illustrate the method.