On the Interplay between Platform Concept Development and Production Maintenance

Paper in proceedings, 2017

To meet a broad customer-base, platforms can be used to achieve commonality and distinctiveness among a family of products. However, producibility of product variants are typically not ensured until late in the platform development phases. This may lead to increased production disturbances. To understand challenges in ensuring producibility of a product family in the early phases of platform development, this paper adopts the concept of lifecycle meetings to describe the interplay between platform concept development and production maintenance. Based on this description, we reason that to make early and credible cross product-production decisions, production system capabilities ought to be regarded as dynamic rather than static. While static implies as designed, dynamic implies change over time. In this paper, maintenance is regarded as one dynamic aspect of production. This reasoning is supported by a theoretical perspective and an illustrating case from the aerospace industry. The contribution of this paper may form the basis for future research on platform development and the effect of product variety on production systems.