Necessity of the consideration of strategic aspects in variant decisions of modular product architectures

The trend of today´s companies to reverse the threat of an increasing complexity, resulting from globalization effects, customer requests for individualization or shorter product life cycles, by a modular product architecture, can be observed more and more often. However, the concept of an alternative type of product structuring is novelty for many businesses. The risk of a recurring upsurge in complexity, when refining the implemented modular product architecture is high. This is due to an insufficiently planned and executed reutilization of the existing and newly developed modules and module variants. The solution is the early consideration of all relevant strategic aspects on module or module variant decisions. Therefore, an approach to collect these strategies and to visualize them in the strategy-contribution-map has been developed and tested at Bosch Thermotechnology. Additionally, the subsequent deployment of this method is presented and discussed.