Question

Suppose you are running a indoor bike parking. Discuss the aspect of “modularity” in conjunction to your market analysis ? How can having this dimension in your analysis benefit current and future customers?

Answer 1

The term modularity is used to describe the use of common units to create product variants. It aims at the identification of independent, standardized, or interchangeable units to satisfy a variety of functions. With wide-ranging overall functions, the partitioning of the product into function oriented modules is important, while with a small number of overall function variants, a production-oriented resolution is the paramount consideration. Function modules help to implement technical functions independently or in combination with other functions. Production modules are designed independently of their function and are based on the production based consideration alone

While doing market analysis based on the our product, three categories of modularity have been defined and can be used in company market analysis

• Component-swapping modularity occurs when two or more alternative basic components can be paired with the same modular components creating different product variants belong to the same product family.

• Component-sharing modularity is the complementary case to component-swapping modularity. With various modular components sharing the same basic component create different product variants belonging to different product families.

• Bus modularity is used when a module with two or more interfaces can be matched with any number of the components selected from a set of basic components. The module interfaces accept any combination of the basic components. Bus modularity allows variation in the number and location of the basic components in a product while component-swapping and component sharing modularity allows only variation in the types of basic components.

By adding this dimension in our analysis can benefit current and future customers in following ways:

• It helps to promote innovation and thus a better solutions for our current and future customers
• Modularity helps in creating value for our customers by creating multiple opportunities at the business and corporate level
• Modularity will positively related to the reliability of incremental product performance improvement of the services offered by the company.