The roles of product design modularity & manufacturing task allocation in mitigating the product proliferation-operational performance tradoff

Many firms have decided or are deciding to expand their product offerings through the proliferation of options and variants available within product lines to better align what it offers in the market to customer requirements. Such a decisin presents the firm with a number of challanges with respect to the performance of internal operations. In this paper, we present and discuss three empirical generalization concerning the simultaneous roles that product diseign modularity and manufacturing task allocation play in mitigating the trade-offs between product proliferation and operational performance.