Cost innovations by integrative product and production development

Producing enterprises are facing the dilemma to meet individual customer needs while participating in global price competition. Product complexity and variety compromise production efficiency as they negatively affect process commonality and resource utilization. Realizing cost innovations demands for entirely exploiting the solution space of a product–production system. llowing paper introduces an approach to address this challenge in early stages of product development. The core element is a multi-perspective integrative assessment and configuration model to consider process variance and resource utilization in product and production development. This production-oriented model is validated along the development of the electric vehicle “StreetScooter”.