International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Management

  Sharing common resources is amongst critical factors creating competitive advantages in business and manufacturing. In today’s competitive and dynamic environment, application of the resource sharing approach has become the focal point of attention for business managers. By resource sharing and through common platform guidelines, the possibility of producing an extended variety of products using the least variable production elements is provided. Meanwhile, today’s manufacturing industries are trying hard to plan and manage an effective foundation for creating a value stream from the point of supplying resources to the stage of delivering the final product to the customer. Standardizing and sharing product components and common platforms is of great assistance to this effort. This paper presents a mathematical model to contribute to making the decision of choosing the best combination of common components and analyze the time effects of commonality approach and its possible consequential savings as one of the key performance indicators of a supply chain based on common platform.