DESIGNING PRODUCT FAMILIES:
From Strategy to Implementation
With a focus on the product design, manufacturing, and economies of scale in product development, this program explores how product architecture, platforms, and commonality can help an organization deploy and manage a family of products in an increasingly competitive environment.
“Product Platform and Product Family design is where market dynamics, strategy, R&D and manufacturing intersect in complex ways that determine the long-term success and survival of firms”. – Olivier de Weck
“The best companies in the world use platforms to compete – Apple uses it to offer different sized iPhones, BMW uses it to give you the choice of two and four-door models. The key to this strategy is understanding how to tell the difference between consumer choice and reinventing the wheel”. – Bruce Cameron
DATE:
FEBRUARY 23, 2021
ENDING DATE:
APRIL 27, 2021
LENGTH:
8 WEEKS
8-10 HOURS/WEEK
PRICE:
$2,700 USD
($270 USD early enrollment discount until December 16, 2020)
FORMAT:
ONLINE
Designing Product Families: From Strategy to Implementation
Over the past 15 years, MIT has offered the in-person Designing Product Families: From Strategy to Implementation program to more than 130 renowned organizations from around the globe, including Philips, P&G, Rolls Royce, Oracle, GE, and ABB. Due to its popularity and success, for the first time, MIT Professional Education will offer the program in a 100% online format. The program has been tailored to suit the needs of working professionals in this technical area of expertise.
Today’s highly competitive and volatile market is reshaping the way organizations do business. Rapid innovation and mass customization offer a new form of competitive advantage. In response, organizations are required to implement strategies to design and develop an entire family of products. This is further based on a common product platform to satisfy a wide variety of customer requirements and to leverage economies of scale.
Designing products and product families so that they may be customized for the global marketplace and achieving these goals in an abbreviated time period, while maintaining mass production efficiencies, is the key to successful manufacturing operations. Research in this area has matured rapidly over the last decade, and this program looks at how product platform and product family design can be used successfully to increase variety within a product line, shorten manufacturing lead times, and reduce overall costs within a product line.
LEARN MORE
Do you want to learn more about this course? Get the brochure with all the information by completing this registration form.
We are available to answer any questions you might have.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Thanks to this online program, participants will:
Leverage platforms for identifying new market and product opportunities to generate revenue growth.
Understand the platform concept and be able to prioritize drivers of modularity and product platform design.
Identify major contemporary methods and tools for product family and platform design.
Understand how benchmarking can assist platform and product family design.
Understand the evolution of the industry from craft manufacturing to mass customization.
Grasp fundamental concepts in product architecting such as architectural decisions, decomposition and function-form mapping during conceptual design.
Enumerate metrics for quantifying commonality within a product family.
Understand organizational issues such as divergence in platforms and management roles in platforms.
PARTICIPANT PROFILE
This program was created for engineers, product line strategists, platform architects, R&D engineers, and systems engineers in industrial and government contexts.
Participants have a need to create products, services, and systems that create choice and variety in a competitive marketplace.
Participants are interested in understanding how to define modular and scalable product architectures, utilizing standardization, customization, and platform leveraging strategies to maximize cost savings while increasing the capability to offer a variety of customized systems and products.
Content
MODULE 0:
Introduction
MODULE 1:
Fundamental Platforming Concepts
MODULE 2:
Platform Strategy
MODULE 3:
Product and Platform Architecture
MODULE 4:
Platform Analysis
MODULE 5:
Platform Architecting
MODULE 6:
Planning Platform Development
MODULE 7:
Managing Platforms
MODULE 8:
Industry Platforms & Two-sided Markets
FACULTY
PROFESSOR OLIVIER DE WECK
Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, MIT
Olivier de Weck is a leader in systems engineering research. He focuses on how complex man-made systems such as aircraft, spacecraft, automobiles, printers, and critical infrastructures are designed and how they evolve over time. His main emphasis is on strategic properties that have the potential to maximize lifecycle value. Since 2001 his group has developed novel quantitative methods and tools that explicitly consider manufacturability, flexibility, commonality, and sustainability among other characteristics. Prof. de Weck’s teaching emphasizes excellence, innovation, and bridging of theory and practice.
Prof. de Weck holds degrees in industrial engineering from ETH Zurich and aerospace systems engineering from MIT. Before joining MIT, he was a liaison engineer and later engineering program manager on the F/A-18 aircraft program at McDonnell Douglas.
DR. BRUCE CAMERON
Director, MIT System Architecture Lab
Dr. Bruce Cameron is the Director of the System Architecture Lab at MIT and a co-founder of Technology Strategy Partners, a consultancy. His research interests include technology strategy, system architecture, and the management of product platforms. Previously, Dr. Cameron ran the MIT Commonality study, a 30-firm investigation of platforming returns, which concluded that firms face systemic downward pressure on commonality, partially resulting from challenges capturing the costs of variety. Dr. Cameron has supervised over 50 graduate students, and has directed research projects for Amazon, BP, Sikorsky, Nokia, Caterpillar, AMGEN, Verizon, and NASA. Dr. Cameron teaches the System Architecture core class for the System Design and Management program, where he has taught over 500 students. Dr. Cameron’s teaching in Sloan Executive Education has been tied for the highest rated Executive Education program at MIT for several years. Additionally, Dr. Cameron is the Faculty Director for MIT’s Architecture and System Engineering online certificate, which has taught over 5300 participants.
DR. TIMOTHY W. SIMPSON
Lecturer at MIT Professional Education
Timothy Simpson is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds affiliate appointments in Engineering Design and the College of Information Sciences & Technology. His research interests include product family design and platform-based product development, multidisciplinary design optimization, trade space exploration, and additive manufacturing. He has over 250 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and he is the lead editor on two books, Product Platform and Product Family Design: Methods & Applications (2005) and Advances in Product Family and Product Platform Design: Methods & Applications (2013). His research has been supported by a variety of federal and state agencies, including NSF, ONR, DARPA, EDA, and DCED, as well as numerous companies, ranging from startups to multi-national corporations. He has worked with over 30 different companies to apply his research methods to improve their product lines and product development practices, and he helped establish and manages the Product Platforms Group on LinkedIn.
GUEST SPEAKERS
Su Chang
Senior Director at The Procter and Gamble Co.
Kenneth Eskildsen
Modularization Architect at Danfoss Drives
Professor Annabelle Gawer
Chaired Professor in Digital Economy at the University of Surrey
Daisuke Goh
Founder, Piic Camera Sharing Japan
Stephen Nichols
Associate Director of Systems Engineering at Otis Elevator Co.
Andries Otter
Decommissioning and Restoration Excellence Manager at Shell Global Solutions
Mandar Padmawar
Technical Lead for Wearables at Bose Corporation
Brian Parker
Vice President of Engineering and International Operations at Environmental Solutions Group
Yuvraj Singh
Leader for Solutions Delivery at Refinitive (MENA)
Methodology – Learn by doing
We believe in practical applications and implementing what you learn. That’s why at MIT Professional Education, we will give you the tools to make your experience as fulfilling as possible.
Participants will have the chance to participate in an engaging and collaborative classroom environment with discussion forums and group activities. The participants of our programs can interact directly with peers and program facilitators.
Delivery mode – This program is completely Online
The virtual campus is available anytime, anywhere. It is a space for continuous learning far beyond the limitations of a traditional classroom.
Participants can find more information on the program methodology and the evaluation criteria in the program brochure.
CERTIFICATE
All participants who successfully complete the program will receive an MIT Professional Education Certificate of Completion, as well as 6.4 Continuing Education Units (CEU).
In order to obtain CEUs, participants must complete a required CEU accreditation form. CEUs are calculated based on the number of learning hours in each course.
OTHER LANGUAGES
MIT Professional Education offers online programs to Spanish-speaking professionals as well, including our Designing Product Families: From Strategy to Implementation program.
For more information, visit our Spanish Website.
- Su Chang
Senior Director at The Procter and Gamble Co. - Kenneth Eskildsen
Modularization Architect at Danfoss Drives - Professor Annabelle GaweR
Chaired Professor in Digital Economy at the University of Surrey - Daisuke Goh
Project Leader at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. - Stephen Nichols
Associate Director of Systems Engineering at Otis Elevator Co. - Andries Otter
Decommissioning and Restoration Excellence Manager at Shell Global Solutions - Mandar Padmawar
Technical Lead for Wearables at Bose Corporation - Brian Parker
Vice President of Engineering and International Operations at Environmental Solutions Group - Yuvraj Singh
Leader for Solutions Delivery at Refinitive (MENA)
BENEFITS
MIT Professional Education offers a number of benefits for participants who successfully complete the Designing Product Families: From Strategy to Implementation program:
MIT Professional Education
Fire Hydrant Award
Jerome Wiesner, president of MIT (1971-1980), described the experience of studying at MIT as “drinking from a fire hydrant.” Living and learning at MIT requires endurance, consistency, and a great deal of determination.
Our professional programs reflect and instill these essential capabilities. The “Fire Hydrant Award” was born as a way to acknowledge those students who demonstrate a constant thirst for learning and the ability to put knowledge into practice. This award is also given to participants who embody MIT’s core values: excellence, meritocracy, courage, humility, curiosity, and a passion for problem-solving and improving society.
CUSTOM PROGRAMS
At MIT Professional Education, we are committed to accompanying organizations as they aspire to provide their professionals with the ongoing education critical for success in today’s competitive environment.
That’s why we offer plans for companies who wish to train their professionals with us:
For any more information on our Custom programs, please contact us at professionalprograms@mit.edu
TESTIMONIALS
This course is a must for any professional who is interested in developing an effective product platform or product family. This program quickly lays foundations of system architectures and then gets into the how and why of applying those architecture concepts into a platform, module, or product family. This information also gives tools to the practitioner to develop a commonality plan, along with its rewards and challenges, for implementing for their own use.
AEROSPACE FELLOW
Very pertinent to today’s business challenges in product development.
CORPORATE DIRECTOR, ENGINEERING IT, HONEYWELL
This program helps you to appreciate another perspective to system designing. Before this program, my initial view of product platform design was based on the relationship of components and their functions. As the program progressed, I learned to realize that commonality can be defined on a number of dimensions, focusing on a number of attributes to meet a number of goals.
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER, GENERAL DYNAMICS, ADVANCED INFORMATION SYSTEMS
SIGN UP
Complete the online registration form on the following page by clicking on the Enroll Now button below.
Pay online on PayPal’s secure platform.
Your seat will be reserved upon confirmation of payment.
We will send you the necessary information to access the virtual campus so that you can begin to familiarize yourself with it.
COURSE FEE
$ 2,700 USD
($270 USD early enrollment discount until December 16, 2020)
Payment can be made via:
- PayPal
- Bank transfer (please consult our advisors if you prefer this option).
* For US residents we now offer a split-payment option via PayPal. For more information please click here to contact us.
For non-US residents interested in a split payment option, for more information please click here to contact us.