Flexibility of platforms and its impact on platforms lifecycle: a review and a focused case
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Examensarbete för masterexamen
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The market demand for differentiated product variants keeps increasing. A platform
strategy is followed by companies to develop differentiated products to adapt to the
forever changing customer needs while cutting the development lead times. In the
automotive industry, this strategy has been used for decades to produce different
variants of vehicles based around a common architecture. The longevity of platforms
is expected to decrease due to the faster changing market. To fulfil the customer
needs with minimal changes to the production architecture, a modular platform is
a good candidate. This eliminates the hefty cost of completely redesigning a new
platform or heavily modifying an existing platform architecture and its associated
production setup. There is currently a lack awareness in practice of how modularisation
methods can enhance the flexibility of platforms and companies generally
rely on subjective approaches.
This thesis was carried out in collaboration with Volvo Cars, with the goal to investigate
the flexibility of the current platforms, the trade-offs required to achieve
a highly flexible platform, and the role of geometry and space allocation of components
regarding flexibility level. In-depth interviews were conducted with employees
working at different departments at Volvo Cars. The interviews provided insights
into the company’s way of working with regards to modularisation, the drawbacks
with it and expected future challenges.
The interview data was analysed in detail using reflective thematic analysis, comparing
and categorising the data according to the relevant themes associated with the
research questions. Furthermore, a case study of a component was conducted to get
an understanding of the design and interfaces across vehicles of different variants.
The practices followed for modularisation is at different levels of sophistication between
departments at Volvo Cars, and generally trailing behind the state-of-the-art.
The trade-offs identified were well understood and the qualitative analysis showed
that the modularisation of pure mechanical modules is better defined and documented
in comparison to electrical and software modules. The new developments
like the electrification of cars pose challenges affecting the decision-making process
and modularisation strategy at Volvo Cars.
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Platforms, Modularisation, Modules, Interfaces.