Supporting Product Platform Decisions with Lifecycle Costing

Product program optimization gains increasing relevance in industrial practice, due to rising number of variants in the context of product individualization. The definition of a product platform for several products of the program is a promising measure to reduce internal variety for the company. However, decisions for the right platform concept are challenging. Therefore, this publication aims to present a platform and a lifecycle cost model, which are both integrated in a process model to develop and assess different platform concepts for a product program. The presented concept has been applied on an industrial use case to evaluate its applicability. The evaluation emphasizes the applicability of the model as it supported the decision for one platform concept.