Designing products for variety and how to manage complexity

Abstract

When products are designed for variety, the number of parts, number of models, and the number of their brands increases. This increases the level of complexity the organization has to go through to manufacture the product. In order to manage the product and process complexity, it is often required to decompose the job into a small number of tasks or activities so that the level of abstraction in each is reduced. This reduces the dependency between the decomposed tasks thus reducing the complexity. The amount of efforts required to complete the job, however, is proportional to the square of the number of tasks in the decomposed set. This paper describes how to manage complexity in that situation so that the communication efforts stay within an acceptable range.

Citation

Prasad, B. (1998), "Designing products for variety and how to manage complexity", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 208-222. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610429810222840