Q&A
How to Build a Competitive Advantage?
What are the main challenges facing business and industry today?
I think the main challenges are to really fulfill customer needs. If you’re not fulfilling them, customers will not only go elsewhere, they will also tell others that you can’t meet their needs.
What are the opportunities?
For me, the most amazing thing about modularity is that it can handle creating the diversity that customers are asking for, give you scale effects and – at the same time – enable you to introduce new technology really fast.
Modularity takes away the paradigm which is out there: that either you’re tailor-making things, or you’re operationally excellent with very few product variants or you’re having the best technology in the market. You can actually handle all of these axes at the same time and start playing in a different league
Why did you start Modular Management?
It all started in the 1990s, with a team of dedicated researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and IVF Swedish Institute Of Production Engineering Research. We were investigating the drivers behind modularization and how it was being successfully employed in product design, development and marketing by a number of companies including Sony, Honda, and Scania.
Using our research, we built a working model for approaching and implementing modularization in a structured and effective way. We recognized that our model would have great value for any organization dealing with different or changing customer needs. That led us to form Modular Management in 1996 as a product development consulting firm.
In the years that followed, we developed two more methods: one to quantify the cost of product structure complexity and another to manufacture a modular product in the best possible way. These methods led to our growing reputation as experts in modularity. Today we use 20 methods and over 70 tools to give your company the best possible support for modularization. Modular Management Group is an international company based in Stockholm with subsidiaries in Sweden, the USA and Germany and a partner in Japan.
We’re proud of the results modularity has achieved for our customers – companies like Whirlpool, Ericsson, ABB and Volvo. And thanks to them, we never stop growing and expanding our competence. We’re continuously challenged to improve and develop more methods and tools that make modularization faster, safer and more effective.
