Standardization and innovation: Dissolving the contradiction with modular production architectures

Industry is faced with increasing product variety, technical complexity and shortened product life cycles today. In spite of these increasing challenges consumers are not willing to pay for risen efforts. Industry relies on effective and efficient management and coordination of the departments involved across company and supply chain during all phases of product and process development. Modular Production Architectures (MPA) are a useful management-tool for the upcoming difficulties during product and process development. Especially, MPA can contribute to dissolve the contradiction between standardization and innovation. In this paper current standardization approaches are presented, i.e. general modular product architectures and process construction kits. MPA are then derived from the existing models as a standardization approach for the product-process-link. The methodology is described using a three step approach. Firstly, the product type range and the production steps have to be determined. Subsequently, the best-practice is to be identified by comparing different alternatives or benchmarking across competitors. In the last step the product design boundary parameters have to be implemented in the whole process chain. The paper is terminated by a validation of the presented approach in automotive industry.