APPROACH FOR MANAGING LEAN PRODUCT DESIGN

Flexibility is the main keyword in order to face the rapid changing market requirements. Companies need methods and tools in order to implement flexibility over the whole product development process, from ideation to manufacturing. The proposed approach goes towards the concretization of the lean product design concept. It can be achieved if design alternatives and product modifications can be rapidly evaluated in terms of feasibility, resources, cost and time. The approach is based on a multilevel representation of the product structure, where functions, modules, assemblies and components are strictly interrelated. The complex representation requires suitable software tools in order to model and visualize the entire structure and support the easy user navigation. On the other hand it is necessary to define rules and operators to interact with the structure in order to make product changes and evaluate the possible impact. Finally, this system has to be integrated within the product development flow for exchanging data and information with CAD, PLM and ERP tools. In this paper the general approach is defined and the preliminary software solution is described.