Product Design Vs Modular Design

Usually, product design innovation includes two things, which are function innovation and forms innovative (Liang and Liu, 2010). In order to achieve these two things, there have several strategies be applied by the companies. There have three strategies that we will discuss are robust product design, modular product design and the environmentally friendly design.
First, robust product design is a strategy that be created based on robust design which invented by Taguchi, a Japanese man. The robust design which also called as Taguchi’s Robust Design Method is a design that has been purposely used for improving the quality and the robustness of products (Simpson, n.d.). The definition of robust design in Taguchi view is at the lowest possible

Refer to Agard and Kusiak (2004), modular product design directly to a huge number of distinct products using a finite number of modular components which intended to produce wide variety of products at low cost. In addition, this strategy has a major effect on the system of manufacturing. Researchers had indicated that the delivery time, production cost can be varied depending on modules chosen (Agard and Bassetto, 2013). The modular design will applied when company wants produce wide range of products which supported by minimum technical diversity, reduces process diversification enable the company to control the product development and manufacturing costs. Modular product design is applied by assigning the parts or component that have similar characteristics into a part family or so call a module to create wide range of product (Lau, 2009). The modules enable the company to have economies of scale due to large volumes of module production, range of product variety by replacement of variant components, reduce production costs and protect the environment by reuse the returned modules, enable mass customization (Lau, 2009). However, it also has some drawbacks such as it may decrease the product differentiation since the product similarity is high (Lau,

Zengin and Ada (2010) had indicated that, to comply with global market conditions, company need to integrate customer requirements, technical traits and cost information into product design and eliminate the non-value added functions to reduce the product cost. As to researchers Lim (2016), Kuang and Zeng (2012), and Yong-kang Li and Yan Xiong (2012), they had found that there have many differences among the nation’s culture such as different system value, different needs and wants. In order to make the company to compete with the global competitors, the company needs to improve and change their product design according to different needs, wants due to cultural variable among the nations (Lau, 2009). If the company applies correct product design, they can rapid response to match the different requirement among the world by changing their product design to outstand themselves from others. As the product design always changed to suit different market consideration, the companies will able to have good reputation, great competitiveness and able to sustain in the global market since they always fulfill the market satisfaction as they apply certain degree of standardization or customization. And, when the company offers the products exactly what the markets and customers need, the advanced product design can serve their customers in a cost effective