Today's highly competitive and volatile marketplace is reshaping the way many companies do business. Rapid innovation and mass customization offer a new form of competitive advantage. In response, companies like Sony, Black & Decker, and Kodak have successfully implemented strategies to design and develop an entire family of products based on a common product platform to satisfy a wide variety of customer requirements and leverage economies of scale and scope.

"Designing products and product families so they may be customized for the global marketplace and achieving these goals in abbreviated time period, while maintaining production efficiencies are the keys to successful manufacturing operations. The research on these areas has matured rapidly over the last decade.

Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Front-End Issues Related to Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Effective Product Platform Planning in the Front End.- Platform-Driven Development of Product Families.- Platform Concept Evaluation.- Platform Leveraging Strategies and Market Segmentation.- Product Family Positioning.- Commonality Indices for Assessing Product Families.- Optimization Methods to Support Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Methods for Optimizing Product Platforms and Product Families.- Commonality Decisions in Product Family Design.- Product Variety Optimization.- Analytical Target Cascading in Product Family Design.- Determining Product Platform Extent.- Back-End Issues Related to Platform-Based Product Family Development.- A Roadmap for Product Architecture Costing.- An Activity-Based Costing Method to Support Product Family Design.- Product Family Redesign Using a Platform Approach.- Process Platform and Production Configuration for Product Families.- Measuring Shape Commonality.- Process Parameter Platform Design to Manage Workstation Capacity.- Applications of Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Ice Scraper Product Family Development at Innovation Factory.- Architecting and Implementing Profitable Product Families and Shared Engineering Platforms.- A Case Study of the Product Design Generator.- Product Platform Management Practice at Cetetherm.