Aligning Product Architecture and Supply Chain Management: Lessons from a Survey

Modularity is a key choice in product architecture that literature usually associates with improvements in different competitive performances of a firm, such as costs, quality, flexibility, manufacturing cycle time and customer service. In particular, several authors pose that product modularity can guarantee performance improvements by assuring a better integration of suppliers with the focal company. This paper analyzes the influence of product modularity on operational performance and the mediating effect on this relationship of supplier integration. This study uses data from the third round of the High Performance Manufacturing (HPM) project data set. The analyses are based on a sample of 266 manufacturing plants settled in several countries around the world. To test the existence of the mediation effect, a structural modelling comparison approach was applied. Results found demonstrate that there is a positive relationship between product modularity and operational performance, and that supplier integration mediates this relationship.