COORDINATED PLANNING FOR COMPETITIVE PRODUCTS AND THEIR MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS

Historically, product design has been a joint venture between the marketing and manufacturing functions of a company. Marketing attempts to identify key attributes which are desired by customers and bundles them into product designs. Manufacturing translates these new product concepts into manufacturing operations to be realized as economically as possible. However, goals of maximizing market revenues and minimizing production cost may often be in conflict. In this paper we develop an approach to minimize the above conflicts by identifying product groups which possess manufacturing commonalities.