Extending product family approach to support services

The product family (PF) approach is broadly adopted to develop product variants (PVs) across all the product stages. Product family architecture (PFA) can perform as a general product structure to capture the commonalities and generalize the differences of the PF members. Based on the rationales of PFA, this paper proposes an extended PF approach to support services in terms of platform, modules, for-services data, resources and knowledge. A complex services system including systematic strategy, generic solution and reusable modules can be formulated on the PF level to serve all the PVs. And a series of services bill-of-material (SBOMs) are employed to manage all related services data and documents such as customer product, quality and dismantling etc.