Compendium for modular and platform based architecting

High complexity and variety is a common situation nowadays in most enterprises. Thereby, originating sources of complexity and variety are the market, the organization of the enterprise, processes within the organization and the product itself with its structural and functional complexity. In order to reduce costs and development time enterprises strive to rationalize their product architectures through modular and platform based design. Thus, variety is reduced by the definition of standardized elements on various product aggregation and abstraction levels and across the product variation as well. In the past years a plethora of methods and approaches to achieve modular and platform based product or system design has been introduced. Whereby, each methodology exhibit different advantages and disadvantages according to the actual task and initial situation. This paper aims in providing a stepwise structured compendium and guideline in order to tackle the task of modularization and platform based architecting. Therefore, this compendium is based on the basic principles and methodologies of structural complexity management. In five simple steps the engineer is guided to define the modularization goal, determine the required modularity, select the appropriate modularization method according to the initial situation and carry out the modularization task.