Variety and Complexity in Product Configuration
Year: 2010
Editor: Andreas Dagman; Rikard Söderberg
Author: Nielsen, Kjeld; Ditlev Pedersen, Thomas; Jøergensen, Kaj A.
Section: Platforms
Page(s): 407-412
Abstract
The advantages of using Customization and Product Configuration are obviously and the fact that products must be easily customizable in order to achieve Mass Customization has been described comprehensively in the literature. An optimized variety is in the interest on the customer side and on the other side a minimized complexity is of interest in the production.
In applications it would be addressed as high variety for the customer and less variety for the production. This paper addresses the question of expressing the variety and the complexity. The results from an empiric survey of product configurators in ten products are used to analyze and discuss “how variety could be expressed”. A high variety of product configurations is among the interests of the customer, while on the other side a low complexity would favour the production. In a real case an optimized solution should be found to match these two opposed needs.
Keywords: Mass Customisation, Customisation, Product Configurator, Mechatronic Products