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

From the Publisher

The book is divided into three parts. Part I gives an overview, stressing the essential features of modularity and what companies can expect from implementing modularity.

Part II provides much of the background to modularity. This includes strategies for implementing modularity, the history of modularity, managing the move to modularity, defining the architecture and the module development process.

Part III describes modularity and the products of the future in the new economy of soft modules, computer appliances and information products. Underlying this new economy is a difference in the behavior of the markets, with products showing a network effect and customer "lock-in" that can result in the "tipping" of a market towards dominance by a single technology standard. Companies in the future will therefore be on a continual quest for the dominant standard, entering into often uneasy alliances to further their products.

The Age of Modularity explains how to:

- Develop strategies for maximizing the benefits of modularity

- Manage the module development process

- Understand the market for information products

- Develop new products in a fraction of the time of conventional approaches

- Slash costs while dramatically increasing product variety and decreasing capital requirements

- Increase the rate of product evolution

- Achieve strategic flexibility in the market so as to adapt rapidly to new developments

"The Age of Modularity is a great new book - equally appropriate for the college classroom and the business manager's bookshelf. The concepts are presently clearly, with dynamic examples of applications by world-class organizations. It's theoretically sound and infinitely applicable in the development of both products and services." Rose Rennekamp, Vice President, ACT Inc.

"In The Age of Modularity, Peter O'Grady demonstrates how modular design can result in cost reductions of 15-60%, while radically shortening the product development cycle and allowing a substantial increase in end product variety." George Koenigsaecker, President, The HON Company.

From the Author

Several years ago, I was busy working with several companies when I started to notice that a transformation was beginning in their business environment. There was accelerating pace of change, accompanied by a demand for much more complex products from customers who were becoming empowered by the revolution in communications.

How, I began to wonder, could companies prosper in such an intricate and rapidly changing world? I started to look around to identify industries that were learning to cope with this frenetic and difficult atmosphere. The Personal Computer (PC) industry quickly identified itself as one where the pace of change was frantic, customers were very demanding and the products were amazingly complex. It slowly became evident to me that the PC industry had been able to operate, and prosper, in this turbulent world because of the way in which the PC was built from a number of distinct modules that could be put together in an almost limitless number of permutations. While the PC industry had adopted modularity accidentally, modularity had allowed the industry to adapt to rapid change, customize their products for individual customers and handle the complexity inherent in PCs. It also became evident that PCs had evolved at such a pace because of modularity. Breaking the PC into modules allowed hundreds of different companies to concentrate on a single module, trying all manner of new approaches to gain some competitive advantage.

I then wondered if the same principles of modularity could be applied to other industries. In searching around, I found several other companies that were starting to use modularity, mostly accidentally, but some had implemented modularity as a business strategy. Somewhat surprisingly, I found that these companies were gaining many of the same benefits that the PC industry had gained.

Most of these implementations of modularity were ad-hoc in nature with little in the way of a firm foundation to guide the implementation. It seemed important to capture the essential principles behind modularity so that implementations could be built of a firm foundation, rather than being ad-hoc in nature. I spent some time examining different attempts at modularity with the aim of identifying the essential elements of modularity that could be applied across diverse industries. The results are contained in this book.

About this edition

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