Data management of green product development with generic modularized product architecture
Introduction
Companies worldwide are experiencing increasing social and regulatory demands to behave in an environmentally conscious manner. One consequence is the greater scrutiny of their manufacturing practices by different stakeholders. They are under pressure to concurrently consider product functionality, cost, quality, and environmental impacts in new product development. For example, green product design recently has been of primary concerns in industries due to the implementation of EU's (European Union) environmental protection regulations, e.g. RoHS, WEEE and EuP directives, as well as the restrictions imposed by major electronics companies. According to RoHS, any electrical and electronic products sold in EU nations must not contain the ingredients of lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), and polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) greater than 0.1%. Moreover, the cadmium content must be lower than 0.01% [1], [2]. Since then or even earlier, many international brand owners had taken corresponding procedures in their product development in order to be in full compliance with these directives. For example, SONY™ and PANASONIC™ have established a set of green purchasing standards [3], [4] imposed on their global suppliers. Fig. 1 shows the timeline of major companies in their green-compliant actions.
Most past studies concerning green product development fall into three categories: product design, process design, and supply chain design [5]. Green product design is focused on making a product that adopts environmentally friendly specifications [6], [7], [8]. Green process design involves reduction of the environmental impacts through operation improvement in production process [9], [10], [11]. Green supply chain is to alleviate the impact of the product development activities outside the firm's boundaries like supplier evaluation, auditing and selection, delivery of the final product to the consumers, and end-of-life management of the product after its use [12], [13], [14]. Perhaps the most effective way of performing green product development is to integrate product design with production planning, control, and supply chain management in such a manner as to identify, quantify, assess, and manage the flow of environmental waste with the goal of reducing and minimizing its impact on the environment in the early development stage [15].
Despite a fairly large amount of literatures as above, fewer past studies concerned the data management issue in green product development. Some PDM vendors and proprietary systems [16], [17], [18] started offering green product modules, but their focuses were on managing/auditing hazardous substances, with less support to conducting the development process in a systematic or effective manner. Moreover, the design of those tools takes the perspective of the product owner (i.e. the branding company), rather than that of its suppliers, who yet make decisions directly impacting the environment. Most of the company standards are stricter than those imposed by nations. Their enforcement has a profound impact on the organizations that primarily rely on goods export. For example, most Taiwanese companies are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which mainly operate on the OEM (original equipment manufacturing), ODM (original design manufacturing), and/or EMS (electronics manufacturing services) business model. For green compliance, these companies must not only begin to offer manufacturing services, parts, technologies, and systems that are WEEE/RoHS compliant, but also need to fulfil the purchasing standards regulated by their customers, i.e. international brand owners. Almost all of the global manufacturers in Taiwan, such as Quanta™, MiTAC™, Inventec™, ASUS™, and FIC™, declared to have converted their suppliers and partners into the so-called green supply chain [5]. They have so far been committed to restricting use of hazardous substances in the manufacturing processes and production activities.
On the other hand, it is essentially uneconomical for any company to develop a product in a different manner each specifically for one green directive. To impose the strictest regulation on the product is certainly not a cost competitive solution, either. In practice, there is a lack of systematic managerial methods for product development which can meet different environmental regulations at the same time in an economical way. The problem faced by many Taiwanese companies is more complex than that encountered by their customers. OEM/ODM/EMS companies need to manage (or monitor) hundreds or even thousands of suppliers so as to guarantee their green compliance. In addition, they must simultaneously follow different purchasing standards imposed by their customers. In the absence of a systematic methodology and practical experience, these companies have chosen to employ such short-term strategies as “over-quality” and “case-by-case” as their tentative solutions [19]:
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Acquire the EIA/ECCB (Electronic Industries Alliance/Electronic Components Certification Board) 954 authentication to be qualified as “Green” supplier.
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Establish and implement green design guidelines in a full scale.
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Convert to green supply chain by imposing design specifications and material declaration on low-tier suppliers.
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Improve the manufacturing processes such as lead-free process implementation.
Restriction on hazardous substances significantly affects the upstream and downstream manufacturers. One big challenge is to establish a collaborative process of material declaration with their multi-tier suppliers or supplier network [20]. However, facing the numerous regulations from different countries and brand owners, local companies have not yet been able to come up with a feasible and long-term plan. Even worse, many of them are still producing non-green products at this transitional stage, i.e. green and non-green parts/products/processes co-exist in their product development.
To solve such a critical problem, this paper develops a systematic methodology that facilitates management of product development data containing both green and non-green variants. We propose a four-level generic modularized product architecture which works as a unified product representation. Integrated with product modularization techniques, it allows development of green and non-green products at the same time. An option control mechanism avoids creation of incorrect BOMs consisting of incompatible modules. Such a product variation mechanism is implemented using PDM (product data management) functions. The development of a LCD TV product family is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. This work provides SMEs a simple but practical tool for managing product development in compliance with various green directives in a cost competitive manner.
Section snippets
Methodology
One major challenge during the development process of green and non-green products in a mixed manner is to effectively manage, maintain, and generate BOMs which contain the right information. Product engineering lends several support tools to this problem such as product modularization, product platform, and commonality analysis [21]. The main focus of these tools is on product design that satisfies heterogeneous dynamic customer requirements. Companies implementing (or attempting to implement)
Product architecture of LCD TV family
The key factor in product modularization is to identify proper functional modules and to standardize the interface among different modules [38]. This section describes a procedure that constructs modular product architecture following a modified modularization methodology [39]. A LCD TV family is used as an example. The procedure consists of the following steps:
- 1.
Categorizing product functions and mapping them to physical components. This step aims to identify the major functions of LCD TV and
Green product data management for LCD TV family
To facilitate management of co-existing green and non-green product models, “Green” is placed as an option by including different green regulations as the option values in the modular product architecture proposed in the previous section. We can skip Steps (1)–(3) in the implementation procedure here. The major task starts from defining the green option and identifying the modules involved by the option values. Table 3 shows the result with additional “Green” option. Identifying the functional
Implementation using PDM functions
BOM conveys key product information that guides the development at different stages of a product life cycle. Every product model has its corresponding BOM in a product family. In the example of the LCD TV family, the combination of options and option values can yield 2592 (see Table 4, 6 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 2 × 3 × 3) different product models and the corresponding BOMs of the same number. This number becomes quadruple 10,368 with four option values, e.g. non-green and the other three regulations shown in Table 4
Discussion and conclusions
Environmental issues have become one of the critical challenges most developed nations and global brands are facing. Introduction of green directives like EU RoHS and WEEE produces a profound impact on modern product development. Companies began to establish green procedures during the product development process, e.g. green purchasing standards, design guidelines, and/or develop toxics-free manufacturing processes. The situation becomes complex when OEM/ODM/EMS manufacturers are producing
Yuan-Ping Luh is an assistant professor in Institute of Manufacturing Technology at National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. He received his PhD degree from Cornell University in 1996. He was an e-business consultant from 1997 to 2002. He started his academic career since then. His current research focuses on the information and communication technologies (ICT) and management applications for global manufacturing industry, including collaborative system development, RFID system
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Yuan-Ping Luh is an assistant professor in Institute of Manufacturing Technology at National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. He received his PhD degree from Cornell University in 1996. He was an e-business consultant from 1997 to 2002. He started his academic career since then. His current research focuses on the information and communication technologies (ICT) and management applications for global manufacturing industry, including collaborative system development, RFID system development, product data management, supply chain management, product lifecycle management, collaborative product commerce, and global logistics management. Currently, he also serves as the deputy director of RFID project office at Ministry of Education in Taiwan.
Chih-Hsing Chu attended National Taiwan University and received his BS and MS from Department of Mechanical Engineering. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Laboratory for Manufacturing Automation, University of California at Berkeley, USA. His past work experiences include a web applications engineer at RedSpark, an Autodesk™ Venture, USA, a research intern at DaimlerBenz™ AG, Germany, and a visiting researcher at the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL), RWTH Aachen, Germany. Prior to joining National Tsing-Hua University in 2002, he was on the faculty of Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Virginia Tech, USA. He was an invited scholar at CREDITS Center, Sungkunkwan University, Korea, during the summer of 2005. Dr. Chu has published more than 100 research papers. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE-TASE), Journal of the Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineers (JCIIE), and International Journal of Electronic Business Management (IJEBM). His research interests include collaborative design, product development, design chain management, and CAD/CAM/PLM.
Chih-Chin Pan is currently a PhD student in Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. He has been a consultant and technical manager on PLM system implementation for over 10 years. His research interests include product lifecycle management, e-business, and supply chain management.