Integrated product and process design: a modularity perspective

Modularity refers to products, processes, and resources that fulfill various functions through the combination of distinct building blocks. As companies strive to rationalize engineering design, manufacturing, and support processes in order to produce a large variety of products at lower costs, they are focusing on modularity. In this paper, integration aspects of modularity of products, processes, and resources are discussed. Modular products result in flexible designs, which enable a company to respond to the changing markets and technologies by rapidly and inexpensively creating product variants derived from different combinations of the existing or new modules. Product modularity has a strong relationship with the modularity of processes and resources.