Product Families and Generic Aspects
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花菇产地
Gerrit Muller
Philips Rearch IST-SWA-IA
Prof Holstlaan4(WL01)5656AA Eindhoven The Netherlands
gerrit.
Abstract
Most productsfit in a larger family of products.The members of such a product family share a lot of functionality and features.It is attractive to share implemen-tations,designs etcetera between tho members to increa the efficiency of the entire company.
In practice many difficulties pop up when product developments become coupled, due to the partial developments which are shared.This article discuss the advan-tages and disadvantages of a family approach bad on shared developments and provides some methods to increa the chance on success.
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version:1.1status:draft24th September2001
1Why generic developments?
Many people advocate generic developments,claiming a wide range of advantages, such as listed in table1.
Reduced time to market(1)
华为应用锁Reduced cost per function(2)
Improved quality(3)
Improved reliability(4)
Easier diversity management(5)
Increas uniformity(6)
Employees only have to understand one ba system(7)
Improved predictability(8)
Larger purchasing power(9)
Means to consolidate knowledge(10)
Increa added value(11)
Enables parallel developments of multiple products(12)
“Free”feature propagation(13)
Table1:Advantages which are often claimed for generic developments
Effective implementation of generic development has proven to be quite difficult. Many attempts to achieve the claims by generic developments have resulted in the opposite goals,such as incread time to market,quality and reliability problems etcetera.We need a better rationale to do generic developments,in order to design an effective generic something creation process.
Figure1shows drivers for Generic Developments and the derived requirements for the Generic Something Creation Process.Thefirst2drivers(Customer value and Sales value)are extrovert:does the product have value for the customer and is he willing to buy the product?The last driver Internal Benefits is introvert,it is the normal economic constraint for a company.倒装句的用法
Today high tech companies are knowhow and skill constrained,in a market which is extremely fast changing and which is rather turbulent.Cost considera-tions are degraded to an economic constraint,which is orders of magnitude less important than being capable to have valuable and llable products.
冬天诗句
Customer value
Sales value
reliability
design for configurability
maturity
predictability
E x t r o
v e r t d
r i v e r s
女生八块腹肌
Figure 1:Drivers of Generic Developments
The derivation of the requirements shows clearly that the requirements are not a goal in itlf.For instance an shared architecture framework is required to enable features developed for one product to be ud in other products as well,which in turn should have value for a customer.So the verification of this requirement is to propagate a new valuable feature from one product to the next,with small effort and lead time.
The drivers and requirements derivation is emphasized,becau many generic developments result in large monolithic general purpo things,fulfilling:
availability accumulated feature t designed for configurability shared architectural framework mature
without bringing any of the customer or sales value;"You can not have this easy shortcut,becau our architectural framework does not support it,changing the framework will cost us 100man-years in 3years elapd time"
2Granularity Of Generic Developments
Figure 2shows the granularity of generic developments in 2dimensions.The vertical dimension is the preparation level:What is the intended scope of the generic developments,how far is the deployment prepared?The horizontal dimension
system
component
黄芪的功效与作用禁忌subsystem platform module
s y s t e m c o m p o n e n t s u b s y s t e m p l a t f o r m m o d u l e Figure 2:Granularity of generic developments shown in 2dimensions.is the integration level:How far are the generic developments integrated when the "product developers"deploy the generic development?
Both axis range from (atomic)component until (configurable)system.Devel-opments on the diagonal axis,which have a scope where the preparation level is equal to the integration level,are straightforward developments in which the integration takes place as far as autonomously possible.Some generic develop-ments concentrate on the generation of building blocks,leaving ("delegating")the integration to the product developer.For rather critical generic developments the generic development surpass its own deliverable to ensure the correct perfor-mance of the generic something in its future context(s).
In the figures a number of medical generic developments are shown,as an example for the categorization.
An extreme example of "delegated"integration is CV ,which stands for Common Viewing.This is an attempt to benefit from generic developments at the end of the eighties.The vision was to create a large "toolbox"with building blocks which could be ud to derive a wide variety of medical products r
anging from MR scanners to X-ray systems.Bad on OO techniques and supporting a very high degree of configurability a powerful t of (mostly SW)components was created.
The CV toolbox proved difficult to ll to product developers,amongst others due to the low integration level.The perception of the product developers was that they still had to do the majority of difficult work:the integration.The vision
of a marketing manager changed the direction of CV into a completely integrated product:EasyVision R/F(EV R/F).This medical workstation for the URF(Universal Radiography Fluoroscopy)market was highly successful as an intelligent print rver.The communication and print function were highly configurable to make the product adaptable to its environment.
The EasyVision R/F was ud as a basis for a whole ries of medical worksta-tions and rvers.The shared functionality is developed in a generic development at platform level.This platform is nowadays called EVM(EasyVision Modules). Despite its name it has still a significant integration level,with its upside(product developers are not bothered with the lower level integration)and its downside (predefined functionality and behavior).
The old CV vision is revived and a cond generation of EVM is being created, covering the EVM pl
atform functionality with a module level of integration.
3Modified Process Decomposition
In[2]a simplified process description is given for a company.This decomposition assumes that product creation process for multiple products are more or less independent.When generic developments are factored out for strategic reasons an additional process is required to visualize this.Figure3shows the modified process decomposition(still simplified of cour)including this additional process "Generic Something Creation Process".
成都游玩Figure3:Modified process decomposition
Figure4shows the process from thefinancial point of view.Fromfinancial
point of view the purpo of this additional process is the generation of strategic asts.The asts are ud by the product generation process to enable tomorrow’s cashflow.
Figure4:Financial viewpoint of process
The conquence of this additional process is an lengthening of the value chain and conquently a
longer feedback chain as well.This is shown infigure5.The incread length of the feedback chain is a significant threat for generic develop-ments.
4Modified Operational Organization PCP
The operational organization of the Product Creation Process is described in[2]. This organization is a straightforward hierarchy,where the limited amount of relations (conflicts)between products or subsystems are managed at the clost hierarchical management level.
Introduction of generic developments complicates the operational structure signif-icantly1.Figure6shows the operational organization of the Product Creation Process,with the necessary additions to support generic developments.
The conventional Product Creation Process is bad on a relative straight-forward hierarchy,where the controlflow and deliveryflow are opposite,but map directly on the hierarchy.The introduction of generic developments breaks this simplicity:a generic development delivers to multiple product developments,while
Gerrit Muller
Product Families and Generic Aspects 24th September2001version:1.1Philips Rearch IST-SWA-IA
page:5
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