Linking modular product structure to suppliers’ selection through PLM approach: A frugal innovation perspective

Abstract

To maintain market share rates, frugal innovation is a main solution for competitive enterprises to meet the customer’s needs in different regional markets. The co-evolution of product and production network aims to manage local production sites of the OEM and several collaborative relations between OEM and supplier companies for better management of the project resources in the regional market. Supplier selection and evaluation are among the main factors to be resolved at the earlier stage to guarantee successful results from any OEM-Supplier collaboration. This paper discusses the potential of using a modular-based approach as a kernel methodology to support the co-evolution of product structure and production network definition, especially in the case of supplier selection for frugal innovation perspective. The application of PLM approach to manage interconnected data describing the co-evolution of the product structure and production network is also discussed.