Eugenia Marilungo

Product-Service Sustainability Assessment in Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises

New directions in modern industry are creating distributed virtual enterprises and pushing companies towards service-enhanced products. Both trends converge when a Virtual Manufacturing Enterprise (VME) is created to provide product-service solutions. At the same time, sustainability is a crucial aspect for industrial networks. This paper proposes a methodology to assess the sustainability of Product-Service Systems (PSS) in a VME by modelling an integrated lifecycle, defining impact categories and KPIs, and evaluating all the partners’ contributions. The method allows easily comparing PSS design alternatives to each other or with traditional products. The industrial case study is represented by a “washing as a service” solution proposed by a worldwide VME. Sustainability assessment is useful to highlight the service benefits as well as the critical phases, and to support VME decision-making.

Traceability as a means to investigate supply chain sustainability: the real case of a leather shoe supply chain

In recent years, the growing attention to environmental challenges has shown that these issues are becoming of more and more interest to both research and industry. Companies are expected to ensure their products are fully traceable and more sustainable, which requires the involvement of all of the actors in the production network. According to this aim, this study proposes a structured approach that uses the traditional traceability concept as a means to identify the main information needed to assess environmental impacts along the whole supply chain (SC). The proposed approach is composed of four main steps: (i) SC modelling to identify all stakeholders and their inter-relations, (ii) data sharing to collect all relevant data, (iii) data elaboration to calculate performance at different levels of detail and (iv) result interpretation to optimise the SC. The distributed implementation of the approach at different SC steps represents a useful means to practically realise a sustainable SC management. A case study involving a leather shoe SC is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in identifying criticalities, supporting the selection of the most appropriate suppliers and correctly setting a management strategy towards the optimisation of internal and external traceability and environmental sustainability performances.

A QFD-based methodology to support Product-Service design in manufacturing industry

Recently manufacturing enterprises are challenged by the transition from product-centered solutions to the new concept of Product-Service System (PSS). However, designing a new PSS implies the definition of new specifications and the integration of the necessary assets to create a coherent system. This paper presents a QFD-based methodology to support manufacturing companies moving from products to services by focusing on product-service design. It starts from the analysis of the target market and customer needs, and correlates them with the functionalities and with the assets offered by the company ecosystem. The method is validated on a real case study where a white goods producer wants to innovate its business by service-based solution. Assets are virtualized and selected with the final scope to design a highly sustainable PSS. The case study considers the design of a predictive maintenance service for dryers, which includes the product enhanced with advanced HW and SW components, a remote service for product monitoring and data elaboration, and a web / mobile application for customer interaction and service provisioning.

An Approach for Managing Engineering Changes in Product Families

Product development is characterized by continuous updating of existing solutions in order to cope with new market requirements. Families of product variants are used to satisfy the needs of new potential customers and penetrate new market niches.New requirements impact on the structure of a product to be changed and also on the other instances of the family which share common parts. Several change management approaches have been proposed in the literature but they are limited to analysis of a single product instance.This paper proposes a dependency-based change propagation approach which is able to cope with engineering changes extended to product families. The proposed tool is based on a multilevel representation of the product structure, where functions, modules and physical parts are defined and interrelated. This system allows evaluating the consequences of engineering changes introduced in the family structure and computing indices of the impact on several design for X contexts.The tool was tested within the R&D department of a large sized company producing household appliances. Gather data are presented and analyzed to identify potentialities and shortcomings of the approach.Copyright

A reference ontology approach to support global product-service production

The need to innovate and compete drives organisations to constantly seek new approaches to facilitate business and commerce. As market places become ever more globalised and digital economies grow, these organisations rely more heavily upon systems to design and deliver their products and services. Hence, when developing and operating a global production network the need for systems to interoperate between different domains and contexts within a global production network becomes paramount if organisations are to succeed. This paper puts forwards a reference ontology that has been developed to enable the interoperation of software tools involved in the global production of new product-services systems (PSS). It sets out the levels of the reference ontology, detailing closely the product-service aspects. This has been developed using a formal logic-based approach. An example knowledge base has been created from industrial end user information with queries applied to this to provide a set of results, showing the ability of the reference ontology.

Product-Service Lifecycle Management in Manufacturing: An Industrial Case Study

Product-Service is a recent concept based on a novel product understanding consisting of integrated product and service shares. It represents a new trend for industries to innovate their artefacts and create fresh business opportunities. However, moving from product to services requires the identification of the needed assets to create the new solution and the integration of both product-related and service-related activities into a unique product-service lifecycle. In practice, such an evolution can be defined theoretically but it is hard to implement since supporting tools are strongly product-centred yet. As a consequence, product-service is still a fascinating idea especially in manufacturing sector. This paper tells about a success story of product-service management in manufacturing industry; it describes how a household appliances’ manufacturer shifted from traditional product lifecycle towards product-service lifecycle to manage the new service. The study starts from analysis of the AS-IS processes and mapping of the ecosystem tangible and intangible assets, and describes how the company was supported into the definition of an integrated product-service lifecycle.

A Sustainability Lifecycle Assessment of Products and Services for the Extended Enterprise Evolution

Recently numerous companies are moving from products to services to create new business opportunities and increase the value perceived by the customers thanks to an extended value creation network. The research challenge is to support traditional manufacturing enterprises evaluating the shift from products to services as far as sustainability is concerned. While product sustainability can be assessed by several tools, the impacts of PSS (Product-Service Systems) are almost unexplored. This paper adopts a holistic approach to assess sustainability by estimating three main impacts: environmental, economical and social. The methodology is illustrated by means of an industrial case study focusing on washing machines; it analyses the traditional scenario based on tangible product selling with a vertical supply-chain, and an innovative PSS scenario proposing washing as a service within an extended network. Data comparison highlights the achievable benefits of PSS on sustainability.

Technical-Business Design Methodology for PSS.

Concurrent Design (CD) is a systematic approach to integrated product design that emphasizes the response to customer expectations and the combination of creativity and engineering. Such a concept represents also the basis of ProductService System (PSS), which represents a valid way for companies to add value to their products, create new value propositions, and easily improve their solution portfolio. Indeed, the fulfilling of the customer needs is fundamental for creating successful industrial PSSs (IPSSs), which aim at combining products and services into a marketable solution. However, the integration of technical and business aspects is crucial to succeed. In this context, this paper proposes an integrated methodology for PSS addressing both technical and business aspects; it adopts a QFD-based approach to structure PSS information along the different process stages, considering four main domains: customer, functional, assets and network. It allows technical feasibility to be carried out and business framework to be defined at the same time to have a robust design concept and a reliable business model from the early design stages. The method is based on the direct involvement of the customer voice according to the CD paradigm. The proposed method also allows to define earlier the network of stakeholders and to dynamically reconfigure the network itself along the process, promoting the creation of the lean enterprise.

Energy Monitoring for Investigating the Sustainability of Extrusion Process

It is well known that industrial processes require large consumption of energy and other resources in the realization of products. This exploitation of energy is reflected on the environment, in terms of environmental impact, and on the ecosystem of the entire supply chain, in terms of social and economic impacts, which can be measured through specific tools. The measurement of these environmental, social and economic impacts is an essential step towards both the process monitoring and sustainability energy assessment. Numerous studies have recently been focused on industrial energy use and energy efficiency in various manufacturing sectors.

Assessing sustainability and supporting compliance to standards in continuous industrial processes

Nowadays, companies need to develop sustainable solutions to be competitive and to respect international standards. It means producing products compliant to target costs, impacts and risks, as well as exploiting sustainable processes. This is particularly challenging for those processes requiring a large consumption of energy, which have high environmental and economic impacts. In this paper the industrial process of plastic material extrusion is considered and analysed. Indeed, it is a highly energy-consuming process that requires monitoring the energy consumption and controlling the process parameters to increase the sustainability and assure the respect of standards. The research is based on lifecycle design (LCD) and sustainable manufacturing principles. The proposed method aims at improving the extrusion process sustainability by identifying the more energy-consuming phases and evaluating the impact of manufacturing process items on the achievement of target values. The industrial case study demonstrates how such a method supports sustainability optimisation and compliance to standards.