Proposal of a modular design method considering supply chain: comprehensive evaluation by environmental load, cost, quality, and lead time

Abstract

For achieving the sustainable consumption and production, designers and manufacturers should provide inexpensive products that create a low environmental load on the user. Accordingly, products and their components should exhibit a modular design, which can be achieved by considering some factors such as future reuse, remanufacturing, and upgrading. Modular design methods primarily focus to reduce the lead time or costs associated with designing an entire family of products. However, resource efficiency is an important consideration associated with reuse as well as with the production and procurement stages of manufacturing. Hence, proper supplier selection is crucial because new products comprise several components and modules supplied by various manufacturers. So, this paper proposes a modular design method and strategy based on supply chain management. Especially, the proposed method evaluates a modular design strategy based on the cost, environmental load in transportation, quality, and procurement lead time. After deriving modular architecture candidates by Design Structure Matrix clustering that divide functionally closer parts into groups, a proposed indicator is used to evaluate the efficiency of the candidates based on the modular architectures and suppliers. This study applies the proposed method to design a laptop computer and derives an appropriate modular architecture and suppliers with respect to each destination