Managing Design of Assembly Sequences for Product Lines That Delay Product Diierentiation

Integration of product design and operations could potentially enhance the ability of manufacturers to provide large variety in the product line while keeping their operations competitive. In this paper, we present an integrated model that provides insight on how manufacturers could design their products in order to delay diierentiation during operations. Our integrated model consists of two sub-models: (1) An assembly sequence design model which captures one-time design costs incurred for providing assembly se-quencing exibility in components and (2) a vanilla connguration model which captures the per period operations cost while determining the design of vanilla boxes and optimal operational parameters to respond eeectively to customer demands. We provide an eeective solution methodology to nd the assembly sequence and the operational parameters for a given product line. In our computational study, we provide various insights on this problem including those related to operations re-sequencing, setup reduction and clustering of features.