To increase sales and market position, automotive OEMs must have comprehensive strategies for developing innovative products while continuing to reduce costs, increase quality and accelerate time to market. One of the strategies that can help them to achieve these objectives is strategic modularity. A modularization strategy can help automakers reduce cost and time to market, as well as improve quality and launch readiness.
While a significant number of OEMs are adopting modularity strategies, the realization of benefits has been, for many OEMs, limited in scope and scale. These limitations are due to:
Process issues in managing dependencies across multiple programs and platforms;
Measurements which discourage modularity adoption, together with an inability to measure enterprise costs;
Organizational issues associated with siloed structures, a lack of clear roles and responsibilities, and the management of disparate groups across the extended enterprise.
The underlying reasons for these challenges are often due to the way in which the product development process has been organized, together with governance strategies and measurements that create incentives for design engineers to get products to market faster, and the lack of enabling PLM/IT technology.