Smart platform architecture for family of products

Abstract

Smart products serve customers and their individual continuously changing needs. These products come with services that will actively reiterate upon updated feedbacks. Customer demand variety of customized products but decide largely on prices, which represents a challenge to low-cost companies. High cost companies can identify this challenge but encounter a slowdown in design development to push new products into the market. Platform architecture is the go-to design for achieving product component commonality across product lines. Modularity can be identified in platform architecture to provide faster response to customer needs and makes implementation of new technology easier. Modularity also further enhances commonality of customer-specific modules. As services are developed in accordance to relevant product components in a Product Service System (PSS), the relationship between services and products must be identified to account for modularity within a PSS. Methods used include product line commonality index, function structure, design structure matrix (DSM), generational variety index (GVI) and system dynamics. A case study on video game console platform, Nintendo Switch was done to validate the methodologies and identify effective platform modules in a PSS.