By Anna Ericson and Gunnar Erixon

In an increasingly complex, customer value-driven marketplace, aprogressively greater number of product variants has become one ofthe most important cost drivers for many manufacturing companies.Its negative effects are manifested throughout the entireorganization. Company executives and product development managers,along with design and manufacturing engineers responsible fororganizational results, will benefit from this book.

Introduced here is the concept of modular design within the productplatform approach, intended to increase company efficiency whilereducing costs and time to market. "Modularization" is thedecomposition of a product into building blocks with specifiedinterfaces.

Companies can achieve significant advantages by separating partsthat should vary to satisfy customer needs from parts that shouldbe kept as common units. In this book, the terminology and afive-step method for creating modular product platforms aredeveloped. Organizational benefits from this method include reducedproduct development lead time, concurrent development of theproduct and production system, parallel design and manufacturing,improved quality, easier service and upgrading, and reducedmaterial and overhead costs.