Managing product customization by modularization

Paper in proceeding, 2013

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to organize external manufacturing of product modules. Modularization can be used to facilitate the use of external suppliers. However, the ability to work with continous manufacturing improvements and customization becomes more difficult due to the increasing distance between design and manufacturing. This is also confirmed by the case study done for this paper at a manufacturing company relying heavily on external suppliers. In the case study we could also identify how the company handles this situation by using different solutions (facilitators), that are strategically based or influenced by the contextual situation.