Whirlpool increases variety while cutting costs

The client

Whirlpool is a world leader in home applicances with more than 73,000 employees and 72 manufacturing centers around the world.

The challenge

Microwave ovens are a high volume, highly standardized product subject to fierce competition and extreme sensitivity to material costs.

Instead of mass producing to finished stock, management decided to begin producing to order with multiple brands, customer-adaptations and small production runs. At the same time, costs were to be cut by as much as 60%.

The solution

In a traditional microwave oven, knobs and buttons are placed directly on the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) in reserved positions. If a knob needs to be repositioned, a completely new PCB is needed. Additionally, each unique configuration requires a unique panel with a specific set of holes.

In co-operation with Modular Management, a modular approach was taken. First, panels were given pre-defined surfaces so that buttons could be freely positioned. Second, buttons and knobs were placed directly on the PCBs so they could communicate via a standardized interface.

The results

“I believe we saved a full year of development time and we launched the first Opera products well ahead of schedule,” explains Jorma Mäkilä, Opera platform owner. “The key consultant from Modular Management held weekly quality assurance meetings with all design engineers to make sure nobody took off on their own track. The truth is, his work was extremely important in the project.”

“The mindset of modularity allows us to predict the impact of any request for change much more quickly than before,” says Jorma. “This saves time and energy. In our old, non-modular designs, when someone asked us for a styling or performance change, we had to review the entire design.”

With the introduction of modularity, there are now around 200 active product variants. “When I retire, I expect I will still be working with Opera products,” says Conny Gustafsson, product architecture specialist at Whirlpool. “It’s like our body: the cells are replaced gradually,” Conny continues. Stability is key to properly implemented modularity: instead of throwing out the platform and starting from scratch, Opera products now evolve, saving both development time and production costs.

To find out more about the benefits Whirlpool gained from modularity and how Modular Management helped implement a new product architecture, download the Whirlpool case story (pdf 2 MB)