RECOGNITIONS
Modular Platform Approach to Product Design
9.6.2009 09:54, author: Maruša Bertoncelj
Modular Platform Approach to Product Design
The economic, social and environmental challenges of today will force companies to rethink their business strategies in order to be able to provide continuous added value, embedded in their products and services, for the customer.
Adopting the modular platform approach to product design is one way of recognizing that the customer is "the king" and doing so, we reinforce and verify the purpose of our business today and in the future.
Ron Sanchez, Management Professor at Copenhagen Business School, often introduces himself as the evangelist of Modular Platform Approach to Product Design. He presented a part of this theory at the Design and development of new products and services in the times of global economic and environmental challenges lecture on June the 4th, event organised by GDS and Ljubljana Faculty of Economics. Sanchez, GDS's pratner, regulary lectures at Ljubljana Faculty of Economics every spring.
Professor Sanchez stressed out how important it is to regularly check our core business strategic alignment, starting with our business strategy. Doing so we prevent it from losing its shape, just as any other system tends to.
Basically the first rule is not to forget our customer. Who they are, what they are like, what they (really) want and what they (really) need. Obsolete as it seems everything starts and finishes with customers. In turbulent times such as we are facing today customer orientation is more important than ever. The winning design anticipates customers' needs and offers the variety of solutions that correspond to the growing need for individualisation. Something that gives a headache to every manager trying to efficiently organise the production line.
Modular Platform Approach to Product Design gives a simple yet very efficient answer to that issue. The logic behind it is very simple but demands a serious shift in organisational thinking. Instead of designing every single variation of a product line and trying to optimise complex production lines according to unstable demand, the product line should be taken as a platform that already incorporates all different functionalities of the final product variations. With this approach standard parts of a product can be designed in a way that they can be mass produced. Only a short final phase of the production line is therefore occupied with differentiation.
Modular Platform Approach is actually a tool that enables companies to radically cut production costs and to increase the variety of different products within a product line at the same time.
Developing new products with a focus on actual customers' needs and at the same time cutting down production costs and increasing product variety sounds like a winning combination worth trying. It is also the approach that GDS successfully applied with several customers and according to its output it actually works.