Product platform: Trends and opportunities

Abstract

Increasing market competitiveness forced industries to seek ways to reduce production costs and increase profitability. Companies operating in different markets face different customer expectations. Thus, it is necessary to develop products that meet the most varied market requirements, without demanding the high investment costs that product customization demands. The development of product platforms has helped companies to lower the cost of mass customization. The main benefit of using platforms is the reduction of investment in customized product development. A platform allows creating specific product families for each market application. In view of this context, a bibliographical review was performed with the objective of finding the state of art for the theme and mapping the research opportunities. For this activity, the research tool ProKnow-C (Knowledge Development Process-Constructivist) was considered. From a quantitative analysis, the most relevant papers were identified, based on authors, periodicals, the relevance of articles and keywords. Then, the systemic analysis of articles related to the theme evidences the frontiers of knowledge. The main objectives, methodologies, and opportunities for future research were mapped from 33 articles selected from the database. In the end, 3 gaps were identified for future work.