A Roadmap for Product Architecture Costing

In recent years many markets have exhibited increasing demand heterogeneity; they are fragmenting into more and smaller market niches. This development threatens the large-scale assumption of many mass production processes. As a result, firms face the dilemma of how to provide a wide variety of goods for prices that can compete with mass produced products. To respond to these challenges, many firms have begun searching for ways to combine the efficiency of mass production with the variety of customer-oriented product offerings. A major focus of these efforts has been the fundamental structure of the product: the product architecture. Examples for this development are Sony’s personal music players (Walkman) that use common drives across different models (Sanderson and Uzumeri, 1995), different power tools that use similar motors (Meyer and Lehnerd, 1997), PDAs (personal digital assistant) that can be turned into an MP3 player, a camera, or a telephone with different attachments (Biersdorfer, 2001), and automobiles with common components across models (Carney, 2004).