Appropriateness and Impact of Platform-Based Product Development
In their quest to manage the complexity of offering greater product variety, firms in many industries are considering platform-based product development. Product platforms, which are component and subsystem assets shared across a product-family, enable a firm to better leverage investments in product design and development. While the platform approach offers a number of benefits, it also imposes certain additional costs that have not received adequate research attention. In this paper, we use an industrial example both to illustrate some of the costs and benefits of platform-based product development and to motivate the development of a mathematical model. The model is formulated to better understand the appropriateness of product platforms and their impact on product-planning decisions. Our results indicate that platforms are not appropriate for extreme levels of market diversity or high levels of nonplatform scale economies. Also, a firm's product positioning and introduction sequence decisions made during the product-planning phase are significantly impacted by the presence of platforms. Specifically, a platform increases the separation among products and offers a multitude of product introduction strategies. We translate our model findings into a managerial framework.
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Volume (Year): 47 (2001)
Issue (Month): 1 (January)
Pages: 52-68
| Handle: | RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:47:y:2001:i:1:p:52-68 |
| Contact details of provider: | Postal: 7240 Parkway Drive, Suite 300, Hanover, MD 21076 USA Phone: +1-443-757-3500 Fax: 443-757-3515 Web page: http://www.informs.org/ Email: More information through EDIRC
|
References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Gregory Dobson & Shlomo Kalish, 1988. "Positioning and Pricing a Product Line," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 7(2), pages 107-125.
- K. Sridhar Moorthy & I. P. L. Png, 1992. "Market Segmentation, Cannibalization, and the Timing of Product Introductions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 38(3), pages 345-359, March.
- K. Sridhar Moorthy, 1984. "Market Segmentation, Self-Selection, and Product Line Design," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 3(4), pages 288-307.
- Mussa, Michael & Rosen, Sherwin, 1978. "Monopoly and product quality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 301-317, August.
- Marc H. Meyer & Peter Tertzakian & James M. Utterback, 1997. "Metrics for Managing Research and Development in the Context of the Product Family," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 43(1), pages 88-111, January.
- Sunder Kekre & Kannan Srinivasan, 1990. "Broader Product Line: A Necessity to Achieve Success?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 36(10), pages 1216-1232, October.
- Paul E. Green & Abba M. Krieger, 1985. "Models and Heuristics for Product Line Selection," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 4(1), pages 1-19.
- Ulrich, Karl, 1995. "The role of product architecture in the manufacturing firm," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 419-440, May.
- Marshall Fisher & Kamalini Ramdas & Karl Ulrich, 1999. "Component Sharing in the Management of Product Variety: A Study of Automotive Braking Systems," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 45(3), pages 297-315, March.
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:47:y:2001:i:1:p:52-68. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Mirko Janc)
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.