Computer-Aided Design 39 (2007) 1065–1074 www.elsevier.com/locate/cad A methodology to redesign heterogeneous product portfolios as homogeneous product families Sa’Ed M. Salhieh ∗ Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering and Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, 11942, Jordan Received 12 February 2006; accepted 15 July 2007 Abstract This paper presents a methodology to redesign heterogeneous product portfolios as homogeneous product families. A heterogeneous portfolio is one that has no common components, or shares a minimum number of components. The methodology proposed to homogenize the portfolio begins by analyzing the current product offerings to determine customer needs and functions. Then, a granulation process is initiated to remove redundancies, and identify physical function carriers to deliver the required functions. Next, function carriers are grouped on the basis of their functional commonalities into groups for parallel development. The applicability and the use of the methodology are illustrated through the redesign of an existing heterogeneous ‘office furniture’ product portfolio. c  2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Product family design; Design methodology; Product development; Conceptual design 0. Introduction Offering a wide variety of products is a well-accepted strategy that companies may adopt to meet the different needs of customer groups. Developing new products rapidly to enter new markets and capture market share may lead to designing a diverse range of products, resulting in the formation of a heterogeneous product portfolio in terms of the components used in each product and/or the manufacturing processes used to produce the components. A heterogeneous product portfolio is one that has no common or a minimum set of shared components and/or manufacturing processes. Companies that find themselves in a situation offering a heterogeneous product portfolio attempt to homogenize the product offerings into a homogeneous product family with a large set of shared components and/or manufacturing processes. Homogenizing (or evolving) a product portfolio into a product family is expected to result in many benefits such as reducing the number of components that an enterprise has to manufacture while increasing the number of product variants that can be offered from the same pool of components [15,13]. This paper proposes a systematic methodology for addressing the issue of redesigning heterogeneous product ∗ Tel.: +962 6 5355000x3078; fax: +962 6 5355888. E-mail address: salhieh@ju.edu.jo. portfolios as homogeneous product families. The methodology begins by analyzing the current product portfolio in order to determine customer-required functions (functions needed to meet customer needs) and the product-delivered functions (functions performed by the products). After that, a granulation process is introduced to allow the redesign effort to enter an abstract phase at the functional level, leading to the identification of a set of physical function carriers (i.e. components) capable of meeting customer needs by delivering the required functions. Next, physical function carriers are grouped on the basis of their functional commonality into functionally independent groups, which can be redesigned in parallel with the objective of reducing the total number of components used in each group to deliver the required functions. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. A review of related work is presented in Section 2. Next, the methodology is introduced in Section 3. A case where the methodology was implemented using a portfolio of office furniture products is presented in Section 4. 1. An overview of product family design A product portfolio is a set of different products offered by a company [10,15,5], while a product family refers to a 0010-4485/$ - see front matter c  2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cad.2007.07.005