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In today’s product development environment, most companies develop product platforms rather than individual products due to the time and cost savings that are reaped from subsequent development efforts. Most of the product platform development literature focuses on the development decisions for a product platform while it is under development, which is logically where the biggest benefits would be gained. However when a new market or a new technology arises, firms often struggle to assess these opportunities within the context of their existing product platforms. There is relatively little work that examines the product platform decisions after the platform has been developed and new, unanticipated opportunities are presented to the development organization. The focus of this work is to leverage the existing literature to development an impact assessment process that explicitly accounts for the constraints of a preexisting product platform when considering new technology and/or market opportunities. In this paper, an overview of the overall assessment process is presented. This is followed by the development of the impact metrics and a case study to illustrate the assessment process. The paper concludes with the next step in this work.

Firms today increasingly seek to leverage product platforms via derivative product versions of the base platform, but successfully doing so is a significant challenge. Numerous enablers are required, such as robust product development processes, effective and well trained organizations, R&D activities that are aligned to support product strategies, and a clearly defined corporate strategy. In derivative product development firms struggle to identify the optimum derivatives to develop and bring to market. Evaluating which feature to improve upon, which technologies to incorporate, which markets to pursue, and ultimately which derivative product to develop is an uncertain proposition that has significant implications to future profitability. There majority tools and processes that exist to provide guidance in these activities largely focus on platform development strategies and decisions. A limited number are known to apply specifically to derivative products, after the platform has been design and implemented. This work proposes a derivative product concept generation and selection framework that extends the design for variety methodology to analyze derivative product alternatives.

In this second part another group of processes of surface treatment of materials in which has been employed a series of principles of the Physics are reviewed. Using technologies that employ these principles it is possible to modify the surface of materials in order to obtain improvements in their behavior, specially in regard to increasing their corrosion, wear or fatigue resistance. In particular, this work describes the processes of flame and induction hardening, surface treatments using laser beam, treatments that use concentrated solar energy and finally the processes of physical vapor deposition. All of them of industrial application, with the exception of the use of concentrated solar energy which, however, has an important potential due to the current situation of the renewable energies.