Developing Modular Product and Process Architectures in Engineer To Order Companies

The purpose of this thesis is to support engineer-to-order companies in the development of modular product and process architectures. This includes understanding the challenges and opportunities faced by ETO companies and the development of methods targeted ETO companies.

The development of modular products from modular product architectures, which is commonly referred to as modularization, has been proven to increase competitiveness across a range of companies and industries. The benefits include lead time reduction during the introduction of new products, reduction of cost and internal complexity, and increased external variation, allowing the company to profitably serve more customer segments. Due to these benefits, interest from ETO companies in modularization has been increasing in recent years, but successful cases and corresponding methods are currently not available in the literature. Challenges related to an open solution space of future variants, high complexity, and low production numbers are believed to be the cause of this dearth.

The contribution of this thesis is the identification of challenges and opportunities and a series of methods to support ETO companies by allowing them to reap the benefits of modularization through the development of modular products and process architectures. The methods, as presented in various journal articles, are listed below:

• The MCI (Modular Candidates’ Identification) method is aimed at the initial phases of modular initiatives, during which the potential areas of improvement in cost and lead time from previous delivered products can be identified before developing modular product architectures.

• The PAPA (Product Architecture Portfolio Assessment) method asses the current product architecture portfolio’s competitiveness in an ETO company, which is achieved by comparing cost, performance, and success of previous proposals in the company.

• The AEA (Aligning ETO Architectures) takes advantage of the lack of a portfolio of existing variants and proposes a method through which modular architectures can be continuously improved while also improving the company’s sales and product development phases

• The MESA (Mechanics, Electronics and Software Architecture) tool provides a method for mapping dependencies across engineering domains that should help mitigate iterations caused by the cascading effects of design changes. These methods have been developed through a combination of existing constructs from literature, case studies, and action research studies. Each has been tested via application in a case company, and the result is a series of methods that can help ETO companies develop modular product and process architectures.