Economical green design: By product architecture on PDM system

Environmental issue has become one of the major concerns by many developed nations and regions. Many global brands today are also developing new products with environmental sustainability in mind. Based on different concentrations, distinct green policies, such as RoHS and WEEE, have been published. Due to management limitations, most corporations in Taiwan utilize temporary strategy such as "case-bycase" or "over-quality". However, costs for green products are relative higher than non-green products in general. Over-quality will kill product competition dramatically. In contrast, case-by-case will lead poorquality products due to the lack of product architecture management. Therefore, investing long-term management mechanism for green product design is extreme important for such corporations focusing on product design and development in Taiwan. How to response to the simultaneous pressures to accomplish numerous green policies and to reduce development, manufacturing, and fulfillment costs is one of the major issues to sustain competitions in green era. This paper states how to develop various products from the same product platform to fulfill different green policies. By product architecture concept with options and variants, ingredients of various products can be determined dynamically for different nations, regions, and brands. This system-level design concept is one of the economical ways to be adopted to generate enormous products concurrently. However, product varieties will induce the complexity of product data. To resolve complicated product data management problem, this paper utilize e-management technologies. How to convert concepts of product architecture, options and variants into product data management (PDM) system is also explained in this paper. Finally, an example of electronics product is introduced to explain the real practice of economical green design concept. The concept in this paper can direct global enterprise to invest longterm management mechanism for green product design.