Economic variety control and modularity

Since the industry revolution, companies have tried to standardize more their components, in order to allow mass production and to increase components’ commonality between products. To remain competitive, companies always have to offer more variety to customers. Manufacturers of complex assembled products that are facing the challenge of mass customization are forced to increase simultaneously commonality of used components and the variety of end products. Variety control is more than ever an issue but seems to lack a complete economic insight. In this paper we propose a systematic economic optimization for variety control taking into account the whole total delivered cost (TDC) including investments and operating costs. It is clear that modular product architecture is a cornerstone to allow end product customization at low cost. Modular architecture facilitates variety control; thanks to interfaces standardization and appropriate architectures, the diversity of alternative modules can easily be controlled. On the other hand the decoupling of modules will always be limited due to inevitable technical combinatorial restrictions between modules. After a description of the main concepts of modular product, we will propose an extent to the model of variety control in order to take into account these constraints between modules.