A design navigator to guide the transition towards environmentally benign product/service systems based on LCA results

Abstract

With rising societal demands for a transition towards a circular economy and intensifying market competition, manufacturing companies are increasingly seeking alternative ways to design and develop their industrial offerings with reduced environmental impacts and increased value. A possible solution lies in designing environmentally benign product/service systems (PSSs), which often requires the redesign of existing offerings in industrial practice.This article presents a design navigator named lifecycle-oriented function deployment (LFD), which builds on the widely utilized life cycle assessment (LCA) and quality function deployment (QFD) to support the redesign of existing industrial offerings towards PSSs with reduced environmental impacts. LFD includes a novel procedure to derive environmental requirements using LCA and to prioritize them along with customer requirements. It introduces a list of generic service design characteristics to support service design. It also contains a QFD-based procedure to identify design parameters (characteristics and components for both products and services) that have a relatively strong influence on the prioritized requirements. Further, a novel way is proposed to capture specific product and service design characteristics that are feasible to integrate and potentially have a rather strong influence on the requirements when combined.LFD is subsequently applied in a case study to conceptually redesign an existing offering in a manufacturing company. The application is then assessed using an LCA and a semi-structured interview with the users of LFD. The LCA results indicate significant reductions in environmental impacts of the redesigned concepts, and the interview revealed benefits for the practitioners who used LFD.

Increasing Value Capture by Enhancing Manufacturer Commitment—Designing a Value Cocreation System

“…Table 3 shows a generic list of service design characteristics (i.e., design parameters) based on a review of the literature that has described service characteristics of various industrial service offerings (Neramballi, Sakao et al 2020). This list is not meant to be exhaustive but can be utilized as a guiding tool while deriving the service design parameters for a PSS on question.…”

Avoid Service Design Trap by Guiding Product/Service System Design with Product-Service Dependency Knowledge Base

“…For this purpose, DP classes are proposed here based on the authors' review of case studies of PSS design practice by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of complex products reported in peer-reviewed scientific journal papers. This review was built upon a previous comprehensive review (Neramballi et al, 2020) using the snowballing approach which was not specific to PSSs by OEMs. While the previous work focused on abstracting service design characteristics, this review was extended to include product design characteristics.…”

“…A designer facing a specific integration potential can jump with a hyperlink to the contextualized case descriptions (from the 42 instances) of the same kind of integration to assess the applicability to the PSS at hand. d) These combinations can be compared for prioritization using the importance of the DPs, which is derived from Step 4 (Neramballi et al, 2020). In Step 6, the prioritized combinations are investigated to generate improvement options.…”

Benchmarking framework for sustainable manufacturing based MCDM techniques

“…LCA can potentially provide the required quantitative information regarding environmental impacts generated over a product lifecycle (Neramballi et al, 2020). MCDM approaches (T6) held the last position regardless of the investigated ranking method (EDAS or TOPSIS).…”