The Age of Modularity : Using the New World of Modular Products to Revolutionize Your Corporation - Hardcover

O'Grady, Peter J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0967028906 ISBN 13: 9780967028903

Publisher: Adams & Steele, 1999

Synopsis

The new world of global competition is one where technological capabilities multiply at a relentless speed, where customers have escalating demands and where products are becoming increasingly complex. In this rapidly changing environment, the old paradigms of monolith products and mass production no longer work. Instead, in this perceptive analysis, Dr. Peter O'Grady shows how the new paradigm of modularity is being rapidly adopted by advanced companies. As The Age of Modularity shows, modularity has given a significant competitive edge to leading companies such as Microsoft, Boeing, Chrysler, Fidelity Investments, 3Com, Motorola, Swatch, Nippondenso, Ford, Conti Tires, Northern Telecom, and Sun Microsystems.

In The Age of Modularity, Dr. O'Grady gives an in-depth description of modularity and shows how companies can use modularity to improve their competitiveness in the face of a constantly changing and complex world. Modularity, as Dr. O'Grady explains, involves the assembly of products from a set of modules. A company can radically improve their competitiveness by using modularity to give a much greater product variety while simultaneously slashing product development times, costs and capital requirements. Modularity also allows design tasks to be segmented, meaning that product evolution can be an order of magnitude faster.

Dr. O'Grady clearly describes the basis of modularity for all products -- hard, soft and mixed -- using a single framework. The development of the framework allows modularity to be contemplated in industries as diverse as automobiles, software, financial services and electronics.

The Age of Modularity is a groundbreaking work and is the first book to describe the main principles behind modularity. It is essential reading for all those concerned with the future competitiveness of their corporation.

About this title

About the Author

Peter OGrady is Professor and Chair of Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Iowa.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Chapter 1:

Organizations are finding themselves pulled inexorably into this vortex of change, complexity and increased customer demands. The rapid improvements in technology, increased complexity of products, improved communications infrastructure and the move to global markets will mean that Darwin's survival of the fittest will be played out with increasing intensity as organizations vie for market leadership. Nothing is more important, nothing more vital to the future success of an organization than operating successfully in this turbulent new world. How then, can organizations compete in this rapidly changing and complex environment? What leading organizations are finding is that modularity has the potential to revolutionize their mode of operation; improving their competitiveness and allowing them to operate effectively in this era of bewildering change.

The journey to modularity is one that has taken us from the early dawn of industrialization to the complex technological achievements that have now become commonplace. Along the way we have traveled through the leap in productivity, and the unprecedented affluence, that accompanied the period of mass production. The world is now ready to take another step forward from the low product variety and relatively stagnant, but highly productive, system of mass production. This step will takes us to the new world of modularity, resulting in a ceaselessly changing array of complex products, with unsurpassed variety and with productivity rates exceeding those of mass production.

Edition details

• Publisher: Adams & Steele
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0967028906
• ISBN 13: 9780967028903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256