Impact of Product Platform and Market Demand on Manufacturing System Performance and Production Cost

Due to the rapid change in customer demands and needs, manufacturers are increasingly shifting from mass productions to mass customizations. Product platform strategy, which is one of the enablers of mass customizations, has been implemented by many companies in order to offer a wide range of products that belong to a family. Recently, a new platform approach was developed where an optimal platform is formed for a product family and is customized for different variants by adding, removing, and/ or substituting platform components to form product variants as orders are received. In this paper, the effect of product platform design and customers’ demand on the production cost is investigated using Discrete-Event Simulation (FlexSim). The product platform and the product platform scalability concepts are examined and compared. The findings of this research demonstrate that effective platform implementation has a direct effect on the overall production costs as well as improving customer satisfactions by offering the desired level of customized products.