Top-Down Financially Driven Modularization

This thesis presents methods to support industrial companies in applying modularization, on a portfolio level, as a strategy for product and production development. This includes a focus on how argumentation for modularization can be supported by assessing financial effects and a focus on how critical modularization decisions can be captured and communicated to support the realization of these effects.
Modularization denotes a decoupling of dependencies in a system, such as a product, to create a number of independent modules, which can be easily replaced, updated, or shared among different systems. The benefits include an ability to improve time-to-market for new product introductions, reduce complexity and cost, and efficiently reach out to niche markets through the mixing-and-matching of modules. Applying principles of modularization as a strategy for development is generally seen as an enabler for improving the competitiveness of companies.
Despite having received much attention from researchers and industrial practitioners over the years, a number of critical challenges still exist. (1) The effects of modularization are difficult to quantify and are often realized over an extensive timeframe. (2) The task of harvesting these effects is often seen as a technical issue handled by designers and engineers in individual projects. (3) The top-down communication of critical design decisions on modularization is difficult and not well supported. A need exists for supporting strategic and long-term decision-making on modularization and for communicating strategic decisions on the sharing of modules and design principles in day-to-day design activities. The research presented in this thesis supports these needs through the following two main contributions:
• The Architecture Mapping and Evaluation (AME) approach is introduced as tool to assess the potentials of modularization across an industrial multi-architecture portfolio.
• A principle for modeling business critical design rules (BCDR) is introduced to capture and communicate decisions on modularization across an industrial portfolio.
The methods have been tested in a number of case studies. The results illustrate an approach to elevate discussions on modularization from an engineering/project level to a strategic management level. The end-results are significant effects in shorter time-to-market and cost reductions.