Q&A

"I still get surprised by the power of product architectures." 

First, Please Introduce Yourself

I head up our North American organization and was a client before joining Modular Management.

Which are the Main Challenges Facing Business and Industry Today?

One challenge is that while the economy is strong, good employees are hard to find. We have to do more with less.

Companies are reliant on employee cooperation, but still run solutions through individuals. For example, smart people often have to start from scratch when approaching new quotes. This works for a while, and then it doesn’t. Complexity levels rise, work becomes less interesting and you have to start recruiting new people.

Surprisingly little energy is spent on sharing knowledge and transferring it across product families over time.

How to do More with Less?

One tested way is to build configurable product architectures that work across product families, and to capture knowledge in a system, such as PALMA^®.

The ideas of doing more with less, mass customization and the experience economy, are not intrinsically new. What’s new is that technology is rapidly evolving and becoming more available to people in their personal lives. Expectations are rising fast.

Your Advice to Companies?

Companies with physical constraints, like products and factories, are working especially hard to respond to changes in demand. Yet while market expectations tend to move fast, products, methods and processes don’t. Things are getting more complex, day by day.

Companies therefore need to rethink their end-to-end process, and the way they organize themselves to create and deliver products. In order to meet unique market requirements, which are basically the requirements of a large number of individual people, companies can no longer afford to approach solutions one by one. They need a structure and a new governance model to stay ahead. And that’s where we come in.

What are Your Personal Drivers?

Consultants tend to travel a lot. Personally I like travelling, but it’s not the places that are most interesting. It’s the culture. The people.

I’m naturally curious and like to figure new things out together with others. You can google answers, but they often lack context and won’t show you the way forward. People will.

What Surprises You?

I still get surprised by the power of product architectures. 

What often happens in client programs is that architecture teams uncover a lot of things, and help executives more than expected.

Customer-centric modules, with standardized interfaces, can help introduce reinvigorate brands and introduce new ways of working across continents. Product architectures have this inherent logic, like a common language, that simply makes so much sense. It’s very rewarding to be able to share something this powerful with others.