An Integrated Approach to Developing Modular Product Families in the Engineer-to-Order Sector

Nowadays, companies face challenges such as globalization, individualization and shorter product lifecycles, resulting in a constant stream of new product development processes (PDP). Modularized product families represent a powerful concept for reducing complexity and increasing resource efficiency in the PDP and beyond. Despite existing approaches and methods in the development of modular product families, there are deficits in the state of the art regarding their transfer and application to the engineer-to-order (ETO) sector, as well as for neutral indicator-based evaluation. Therefore, this paper derives a generic modularization procedure for the ETO sector and verifies it in an industrial use case. For this purpose, a heuristic swapping algorithm has been developed for grouping the components of a product family into clusters and enabling an objective mathematical evaluation. By integrating modular product structures into organizational processes, ETO manufacturers can strengthen their competitive position as well as increase their resource efficiency.