Design and development of modular products

CRIT organized a technological seminar, addressed to the CRIT member companies and to the companies of the Accredited Suppliers Network on the theme “Design and development of modular products“, with the collaboration of Porsche Consulting, a management consulting company belonging to the Porsche Group, and Soilmec Spa, leading company in the design, production and marketing of equipment and installations for deep foundations.

Recently companies have found themselves having to face a strong increase in complexity, both internally, in the development of their products, and externally, in the management of their customers’ requests. On the external front of the company, in fact, customers have requested products with greater technological content and more and more personalized, in order to respond to an increasingly greater segmentation and a greater presence on international markets. The product life cycle has shortened in many sectors, resulting in a consequent reduction in time to market. On the domestic front, all this has been introduced in the proliferation of products and details, with negative impacts on both the management costs of this complexity and on investments throughout the product life cycle.

So how can companies respond to the increase in external complexity without increasing (or even reducing) internal complexity, thus guaranteeing the possibility of growing profitably and sustainably? The definition of a modular product architecture can be an answer to this question.

During the seminar the approach that the Porsche Group has adopted in the last period to define its modular product architecture will be illustrated; the principles that characterize it, how it is structured and the impacts in economic-financial terms will be presented. It will then be highlighted how these principles can be transferred to sectors other than the automotive sector; for the occasion, the case of Soilmec Spa, which has created a modular platform for the design of products belonging to different ranges, will be examined in depth.