Product modularization in new product development has attracted considerable interest among scholars and practitioners from diverse fields of specialization. This has resulted in cross‐disciplinary diversity in the field, diverting attention from its overall intellectual structure and hindering the development of a common view and shared concepts. Extant research lacks an integrative review, transcending a focal discipline that could identify gaps and ambiguities while making recommendations to advance the field. Considering a period of 30 years (1990–2020), we generate a data set of 2988 citing publications to which we apply a co‐citation analysis. Thereby, we uncover the intellectual structure of the field and find three research perspectives that represent key knowledge bases: (1) product system, (2) production system, and (3) organizational system. Delimiting the data set into four periods, we can track developments over time, where we notice an increasing disintegration of the product system perspective, which is rooted in the discipline of engineering design. Within the two other perspectives, we document extensive dynamism in terms of publications, especially in the two most recent periods, indicating an active discussion and a potential receptivity to new trends. For these periods, we also identify an emerging cluster of fundamental publications and an increasing emphasis on the concept of system architecture. Leveraging the synthesis of these results, we forge links between neighboring disciplines and recommend avenues for further research, ideally to develop a more common view.

The design of modular product families enables a high external variety of products by a low internal variety of components and processes. This variety optimization leads to large economic savings along the entire value chain. However, when designing and selecting suitable modular product architecture concepts, often only direct costs are considered, and indirect costs as well as cross-cost center benefits are neglected. A lack of knowledge about the full savings potential often results in the selection of inferior solutions. Since available approaches do not adequately address this problem, this paper provides a new methodological support tool that ensures consideration of the full savings potentials in the evaluation of modular product architecture concepts. For this purpose, the visual knowledge base of the Impact Model of Modular Product Families (IMF) is used, extended and implemented in a model-based environment using SysML. The newly developed Sys-IMF is then applied to the product family example of electric medium-voltage motors. The support tool is dynamic, expandable and filterable and embedded in a methodical procedure for knowledge-based decision support. Sys-IMF supports decision makers in the early phase of interdisciplinary product development and enables the selection of the most suitable modular solution for the company.

Within emerging markets, ensuring the competitiveness of manufacturing companies is crucial to their success. The integration of new business possibilities, such as Product-Service-Systems (PSS) can provide one suitable solution. Especially within the architecture development process, large amounts of interconnected data and data types need to be processed and versioned. This leads to a significant lack of data consistency and continuity along the development process of modular PSS architectures. This lack of consistency and continuity leads to a process being prone to errors, representing a significant negative impact onto the company’s value-added stream. We provide one possible solution to these issues by presenting a PSS architecture modularization approach based upon the modularization methods of the Integrated PKT-Approach. Using concepts of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) for modelling these architectures, automated and dynamic analyses of the architecture for the iteration and harmonization of the PSS architecture under development are enabled. The at first generically described approach is further detailed in the second part of this contribution by applying it to an industry case study for mobile laser welding systems. As a result, a clear support for the visualization of architecture iteration aspects as well as for the enhancement of data consistency and continuity is given.

Due to increasing cost pressure, companies are expanding their product range and therefore increasingly offering so-called product-service systems (PSS) to increase sales. At the same time, PSS can also contribute to an increase in variety-induced complexity in the company, which ultimately further increases cost pressure. In this article, the causes and effects of variety-induced complexity through products, services and PSS are analysed and the need for a new PSS design method is then demonstrated. Finally, a new framework is presented that enables the design of variety-oriented PSS.