Organizational Implementation of Product Architecture Development

Increasing product variety and high cost pressure are significant challenges for manufacturing companies. One approach to face the dilemma between economies of scale and scope is the development of product architectures. This implicates new challenges for both development process and organization. Defined processes and roles are necessary to support product architecture development. A recent survey by our chair states that structured organizational implementation is a success factor when developing product architectures. Nevertheless most companies do not adapt development organization and processes to the requirements of product architecture development resulting in undetermined development goals and responsibilities. This paper aims at presenting a processual and organizational framework for product architecture development based on degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedoms are defined to differentiate between normative, generic and company specific conditions in product architecture development. Normative elements define the mandatory organizational and processual framework for efficient product architecture development. Generic conditions reflect process tasks and activities in the product architecture development that are comparable to product development. Company specific conditions describe possible variations in the organizational and processual implementation. The developed framework can be used to ensure processual and organizational implementation to support product architecture development.