product structuring

For the competitiveness of R&D it is crucial to enhance not only R&D effectiveness but also R&D efficiency. The broad success of Lean Thinking within manufacturing as Lean Production especially bases upon the extensive work to interpret the basic principles for manufacturing systems and the broad availability of examples. Comparable guiding themes are still missing for Lean Innovation. Lean Innovation today is on its way, getting more systematic. The Lean Innovation approach presented here relies on ten key principles that need to be implemented in R&D. Together they operationalise the guiding theme of Lean Innovation: “Structure Early, Synchronise Easily, Adapt Securely.”

Today, most modern mechanical engineering products are strongly driven by information technology. Therefore, the degree of complexity increases, which can reduced by a consistent modularization of the product. This contribution describes which challenges arise especially for the modularization of mechatronic systems, how the product structuring can be conducted and how the product development process is affected.

In the last decade, many factors have changed in the enterprise-environment due to the diversification of the market demand. Enterprises react to the changing situation by offering an increasing number of variants of existing products. A proven valuable attempt is not to deal with short-term measures like designing very customized modules, but to consider the eventual customer requirements already in the first stages of the engineering design process. More- over the engineering design process have to be supported by adaquate IT-tools, in order to manage the data during the development process as well as later during the product life-cycle. This approach can be realised with the Digital Product. This contribution presents the Digital Product and shows the prerequirement of the Digital Product to be fulfiled in the context of the sales process and the product configuration.