Bases metodològiques per a definir l'arquitectura de gamma de producte d'empreses fabricants de béns d'equip industrials
- Autores: Sònia Llorens
- Directores de la Tesis: Carles Riba i Romeva (dir. tes.), Fernando Romero Subirón (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2015
- Idioma: catalán
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Jaume Valls Passola (presid.), Joan Ramon Gomà Ayats (secret.), Jaime Oscar Guía Julve (voc.)
- Materias:
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- Resumen
The current industry situation shows signs of changing market scenarios (linked to new different contexts and realities), globalization and high competitiveness: in order to survive, companies must apply strategies for a product generation that can satisfy the changing requirements of users and markets by means of e.g., time-to-market reduction, a wider variety of products and development, manufacturing and distribution costs reduction.
There is an intensive activity developing strategies and providing supporting tools in order to obtain optimized products. They mainly respond to two perspectives: 1) Market orientation: to create a variety of products suitable enough to reach all markets and potential users (as a way of "customization" of products that meet "the needs" of the market). 2) The orientation within the company: to manage complexity and reduce costs and time to obtain those products.
The state of the art shows the evolution of those tools and methods, mainly by means of product modularisation, which allowed the development of product platform concepts and product architecture, the latter being the origin of the catalogue of products that companies offer. It also highlights the goodness of concurrent engineering and Product's Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), in order to anticipate all phases a product goes through during its life cycle. Recently, new business strategy proposals have been set up which are oriented to providing solutions to the client, instead of offering products. However, the methods developed under this vector are only a few yet, and literature is still scarce and heterogeneous. Nevertheless, the analysis of the state of the art shows great efforts to generate methodologies and tools mainly focused on companies that design, manufacture and sell mass market products and/or products for the end user. That being said, no specific or relevant criteria for the industrial equipment's sector exist. Such criteria would require methodologies tailored to their specific needs. For that reason, many tools proposed by the authors are not feasible in terms of time and resources to an overall analysis of high complexity industrial equipment.
Moreover, from a product's Life-Cycle Analysis perspective, it should be noticed that a product is rarely created as a singular element, whereas it is not used isolated from other products: an equipment product interacts within the operative process as well as within further product and /or operators which may also be involved in the process.At this point relationships between products occur, and as a consequence, the introduction of a new design perspective is needed, namely, the conception and design of a product based on the analysis of the relations of coexistence (ARC) with other products (synchronic dimension).
Based on this perspective, the present PhD thesis establishes a new methodological basis in order to provide an answer to the current scenario of industrial equipment manufacturers. This report provides explanation and redefinition of the following terms: Process Family, Process Family's Architecture, Product Family, Product Catalogue, Range of equipment, Range of equipment's architecture. In addition, this PhD thesis proposes to widen in scope in order to look for innovation opportunities and added value by changing the focus from the product analysis to the operative process analysis and the different contexts affecting it. Thus, a new methodology is proposed for the establishment of a range of equipment's architecture of capital goods, following the following steps: - Analysis of the operative process.
- Context Analysis and definition of the operative process family.
- Definition of the architecture of the existing product range.
- Finding opportunities for innovation - Redesign of operative processes and product range architecture.
This methodology complements existing tools and fits to the specificities of companies offering industrial capital goods.
