Abstract
A product family strategy is a way to cope with ever divergent market needs while enjoying efficiency in developments and productions. A product family strategy could be seen as determination of modular division structure of products and module communization structure within multiple products, which leads to competitiveness owing to efficient use of resources such as engineers and production lines. As the determination of product family structure involves rather large scale organizational changes, cautious planning is required. However, success of a product family strategy is affected by many aspects of the company, such as organizational structure. Thus the decision making is complex and difficult. This paper proposes a method to explore possible product family architectures that incorporates effect of organizational structure. The proposed method makes use of product models and an organization model. The product model captures functional architecture of the product in question while the organization model captures hierarchical structure of decision makings. Based on the proposed model, 4 evaluation criteria are introduced. A case study on a solar boat product line hs been conducted to verify the validity of the proposed method.
