The role of product architecture in the manufacturing firm

By Karl T. Ulrich. 2011

2,099 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Product architecture is the scheme by which the function of a product is allocated to physical components. This paper further defines product architecture, provides a typology of product architectures, and articulates the potential linkages between the architecture of the product and five areas of managerial importance: (1) product change; (2) product variety; (3) component standardization; (4) product performance; and (5) product development management. The paper is conceptual and foundational, synthesizing fragments from several different disciplines, including software engineering, design theory, operations management and product development management. The paper is intended to raise awareness of the far-reaching implications of the architecture of the product, to create a vocabulary for discussing and addressing the decisions and issues that are linked to product architecture, and to identify and discuss specific trade-offs associated with the choice of a product architecture.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Marketing, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5bd80cff92ca1cbab27caf3d92d96e5c39cc7cc8

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

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In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

The nature of innovation in global value chains (2021, background): “In certain industries, firms can choose from a variety of technological architectures, which each have their own costs and benefits (Schilling, 2000; Ulrich, 1995).”
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis (2012, neutral): “Much prior work has highlighted the critical role of architecture in the successful development of a firm’s new products, the competitiveness of its product portfolio and the evolution of its organizational capabilities (e.g., Eppinger et al, 1994; Ulrich, 1995; Sanderson and Uzumeri, 1995; Sanchez…”
The evolution of production systems from Industry 2.0 through Industry 4.0 (2018, methodology): “Function sharing and geometric nesting are design strategies that are frequently employed to minimize mass and/or size (Ulrich, 1995; Yin et al., 2014).”
Managing technological change in the digital age: the role of architectural frames (2014, background): “Although the hierarchy-of-parts frame positions functionality attribution as an activity that precedes production of the physical product (Ulrich, 1995; Baldwin and Clark, 2000), digital technology radically relaxes the requirement of successive freezing of the product design.”
Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Building Robotic Systems (2016, background): “This continuum has been previously investigated in the fields of systems engineering, computer science and product management [3, 49].”
Supplier traits for better customer firm innovation performance (2010, background): “, many functional elements are implemented by more than one physical component and several physical components implement more than one functional element (Ulrich, 1995).”
Agency, structure, and the dominance of OEMs: Change and stability in the automotive sector (2016, background): “(Ulrich, 1995; Baldwin and Clark, 2000)—i.e., one-to-one mapping of function to component; or being independent across / interdependent within module boundaries.”
Global Value Chains in a Postcrisis World: Resilience, Consolidation, and Shifting End Markets (2010, background): “where VS is the country vertical specialization share, calculated as in Hummels, Ishii, and Yi (2001).(28) VS is closely related to the imported content of intermediate goods derived previously from equation 3.”
Institutional Work as Logics Shift: The Case of Intel’s Transformation to Platform Leader (2013, background): “See Ulrich (1995) and Ulrich and Eppinger (1995).”
Digital platforms for development: Foundations and research agenda (2021, background): “It considers platforms as modular architectures (Ulrich, 1995), which are partitioned into a core and periphery (Baldwin & Woodard, 2009), and governed centrally by a platform authority (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013; Wareham et al.”