Product Family Design based on Analytic Network Process

In order to maintain customer satisfaction and to remain productive and efficient in today’s global competition, mass customization is adopted in many leading companies. Mass customization through product family and product platform enables companies to develop new products with flexibility, efficiency and quick responsiveness. Thus, product family strategy based on product platform is well suited to realize the mass customization. Product family is defined as a group of related products that share common features, components, and subsystems; and satisfy a variety of market niches. The objective is to propose a product family design strategy that provides priority weights among product components by satisfying customer requirements. The decision making process for a new product development requires a multiple criteria decision making technique with feedback. An analytical network process is adopted for the decision making modeling and procedure. For the implementation, a netbook product known as a small PC which is appropriate for the product family model is adopted. According to the proposed architecture, the priority weight of each component for each product family is derived. The relationship between the customer requirement and product component is analyzed and evaluated using QFD model.