Modularity as a support for frugal product and supplier network co-definition under regional market constraints: a mirroring hypothesis application

Abstract

Creating new products or adapting existing ones to fit with specific customer requirements from regional as well as emerging markets is a challenging issue for competitive companies that work to maintain acceptable market share rates. Besides the importance of providing original solutions tailored to the target market characteristics, companies should consider their production strategy as a key factor for reaching frugality objectives under regional constraints. The co-evolution of product and production network aims to provide a concurrent design and management of product architecture, local production systems, and OEM–suppliers relationships. This paper proposes a modular-based approach as an application of the mirroring hypothesis for supporting the co-definition of product structure and supplier network. Supplier selection and evaluation method for frugal innovation perspective is proposed as a key part of the proposed approach and applied in an industrial use case for validation.