Product development seminar

Companies making customized products face a significant challenge in setting up robust and lean business processes in sales, engineering, production and installation of customer tailored products. One of the most important preconditions for obtaining lean and robust business processes is to control and reduce complexity in the product assortment. A product configuration system is capable of controlling the product variants being offered to the customers and thus keeping down possible variations in the product line.

In this presentation, methods for modelling product assortments and for making decisions on which product variants to include/exclude will be presented.

You will get to know how Rockwool successfully managed to reduce the number of SKUs (stock-keeping units) without reducing sales and at the same time increased productivity in the factories.

You will hear about:

1. Smart Variety using “Active Portfolio Management”
2. Analysis of “Contribution Margin per hour” from the Theory of Constraints concept
3. Complexity reduction by SKU reduction – remove non-selling and non-profitable SKU’s from the product portfolio
4. Product harmonization and consolidation of volumes with strategic global product lines
5. Continuous focus on production planning policies and processes to reduce change overs in production

The presentation will provide an over view of methods for developing modular product and manufacturing architectures. Furthermore 8 number of architecture strategies will be described. A method for identification of the right number of product architectures will be outlined.

At Atlas Copco, we did a big pilot program to answer one key question: “Is modularity a better way to develop, procure, build, sell and maintain a large multi-tier and multi-brand portfolio of industrial air compressors?”.
During this presentation, the findings that led me to answer that question with yes, will be presented. We will explore the effect on organization, systems and processes, customer value, product cost vs. performance and operations.

Engineering companies increasingly apply configurators to manage both the complexity of their product portfolio and the complexity of their product designs. This requires engineering companies to define their standard ranges and to promote those designs in the sales phases by use of configurators. This allows engineering companies to be in control of when they propose a solution requiring extensive engineering. Configuration does not only guide the sales towards the standard solution range but also supports to automate engineering deliverables such as 3D models and 2D drawings when supported with Design Automation.

GEA Process Engineering has used configurators for a long time with a special focus on cost calculations. A few years ago, GEA Process Engineering expanded the use of their configurators to also support the actual engineering by using Design Automation to auto create both the 3D models and the 2D drawings in project execution.

In this presentation Katrin Kristjansdottir will discuss how engineering companies can benefit from configurators and provide examples from the journey of GEA Process Engineering.