Architecture Grounded Product Line

Mastering diversity

Why companies fail to efficiently develop a product line?

And why they consequently do not meet their business objectives

Many firms implement product-line/platform approach seeking to deliver variety while pursuing ambitious business objectives:

Cost Savings: reduced development costs, economies of scale, reduced inventory,

Revenue Benefits: quicker time-to-market, enter niche markets,

Risk benefits: lower technology risks, higher quality.

But developing a product line is not a piece of cake and can lead to:

Costly generation of new variants or releases: complex, non-modular, non-scalable platform

Poor industrial performance: high costs & PPM, long lead-time and ramp-up

Diversity explosion: over-customization, component proliferation

Project-by-project local optimization: lack of global market & product strategy

No corporate commitment: ExCo, sales, programs, … do not adhere to product line /platform strategy.

Architecture grounded product line approach brings sustainable value and ensures the company to achieve its business goals by a structured approach

Our integrated approach relies on 3 complementary axis to deliver the full value of a product line / modular platform approach

Reducing recurrent and non recurrent costs

A product line approach helps reduce drastically the development cost (-60% in software industry), the customization engineering cost (-50% in aeronautic industry) and the inventory cost (10 M€/year in IT server industry).

Reducing time to market

A product line approach helps to reduce variant generation time (from 200 days to 4 days in defense industry), to shorten the Time-to-Market (-50% in elevator industry) and to reduce Order-to-Product time (-75% in IT server industry).

Reducing diversity

A product line approach allows to reduce component variability (up to -83% in IT server industry) and to increase software module reuse (from ~7% (before) to 90% (after) in software industry).