Paderborn University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology continue their collaboration
The environment of manufacturing companies is characterised by increasing dynamics: rapid technological changes, new market requirements, and geopolitical uncertainties increase the complexity of planning product portfolios. Companies are required to make product strategy decisions transparent across the product life cycle and several product generations. This is where the "ZuPro II" [1] project of the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at Paderborn University in cooperation with the Institute of Product Engineering (IPEK) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) comes in. The scientists are investigating how goals and boundary conditions can be networked across the various planning levels and several product generations in a product portfolio in order to enable future-proof further development. They are building on the successful collaboration in the "ZuPro" project. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding the follow-up project with around 500,000 euros over a period of two years.
One focus of the project is the planning of product portfolios across several product generations. Particular attention is paid to the interlinking of strategic product planning and the basic principles of system generation development. The scientists are investigating questions such as: Which goals remain stable over several generations? Which goals change dynamically under the influence of environmental developments? Which goals set new product generations apart from their predecessors? "We will make interactions between goals visible and analyse their significance for strategic and operational decisions. On this basis, we will develop methods and tools to support companies in future-oriented planning," explains Leonie Happe, project manager of "ZuPro II".
The second focus concerns the planning of product portfolios across several planning levels. Here, the focus is on the question of how goals are concretised from the product line to the product family through to product variants and their subsystems. At the product line level, which includes all of a manufacturer's electric vehicles, for example, goals are often still abstract, e.g. common platform architecture. At the level of the product family - such as a vehicle class - they are further defined, for example by target corridors for range or costs. For individual product variants, specific target values for the overall system must be derived from this, such as a defined range, a target weight, or an upper cost limit. At subsystem level, these targets are then broken down to individual components such as battery, drive, body, or energy management. "The example of an automotive portfolio clearly shows that targets cannot be described in isolation for a single vehicle. They must be consistently linked across variants, product families, product lines, and technical subsystems. This is the only way to understand which decision at which portfolio level has which consequences for other levels," explains Dr Christian Koldewey, senior engineer in the “Advanced Systems Engineering” group at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute and co-lead researcher on ZuPro II.
In the course of the project, the researchers will first identify relevant target variables for cross-generational product portfolio development and analyse how companies are implementing target systems in practice today. Based on this, recommendations for action, design principles, and process models will be developed and tested in a validation study. "'ZuPro II' is intended to support companies in their strategic decision-making processes in the future and enable a coherent alignment of product portfolios across planning levels and generations," summarises Prof Dr Roman Dumitrescu, Head of the Advanced Systems Engineering Group at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute.
This text was translated automatically.
[1] Full project name: Procedure for consistent target system formation in the cross-generational development of product portfolios
