Apply Modular Design On Central Air-conditioner Product Development Project Management

With the rapid development of economy, Chinese government also raises the concerns on improve energy utilization efficiency. The air-conditioning industry need to develop new products to meet both customer needs and government codes alignment. Under this circumstance, the project manager of new product research and development has to work on proper design approach to reduce development span, improve product quality and production efficiency.Based on analysis of company's key indexes of new projects development in past years, this essay discuss applying modular design on air-conditioning product. First, the advantages of applying modular design are analyzed for new product development. Then, details of modular design are focused. On the basis of function breaking down, judging the correlation between function elements by defined correlations. By correlation calculation, clustering function elements by threshold then get different design results. The results then to be evaluated by an integrated grading system for the best solution. With the theory discussed above, the modular design is applied on a new product, 30R, for validation. The positive effects of modular design on 30R are evaluated on the 30R example at different aspects as reducing the development span, lowering the cost, improving operation efficiency. Hence the contributions of applying modular design to air-conditioning product development project management are proven.