Joanna Daaboul

Product-Service Systems for servitization of the automotive industry: a literature review

Nowadays companies are facing several transformations of their activities, empowered and pulled by technological and social evolutions over the few past decades. As competitiveness is a leitmotiv in the market economy paradigm, it is necessary to improve activities through excellence and new offers. In a focus on the consumers’ needs, the limits between tangible and intangible offer are challenged through new kind of offers merging products and service under one common offer. Manufacturing companies, and more precisely the automotive industry, endeavour to integrate new constraints of sustainability, economic globalisation and new ways of consumption made possible with this new kind of offerings. This supports the opportunity to change consumption offers, historically driven by production and consumption of tangible assets. The paper explores a key concept to operate this shift towards a new type of offer gathering products and service into an integrated bundle entitled product-service system (PSS). This paper proposes a review of PSS definitions, methodologies and its applications to clarify the contribution of the literature in enabling its adoption. Requirements to adopt PSS are extracted from case studies and methodologies for servitization are evaluated as means to overcome barriers of PSS adoption. A specific focus is given on the automotive industry.

Value network modelling and simulation for strategic analysis: a discrete event simulation approach

The survival of a company nowadays depends on answering to a customer-driven economy, and therefore relies on the performance of its entire network of partners. Competition is no longer among companies nor among supply chains, but rather between networks of companies which form a value network. Thus, the need has arisen to analyse the performance of a network of companies, and include the customer-perceived value in the strategic decision-making process. This paper proposes a framework and a tool to model, simulate and analyse a value network as a decision support system. The method extends the SimulValor approach and language. The discrete event simulation tool relies on a developed value network simulation library. This paper presents a case study in the shoemaking industry to validate the proposed approach.

Differentiation and customer decoupling points: An integrated design approach for mass customization:

Mass customization draws a twofold benefit: cost reduction, inherited from mass production techniques, and good response to customer requirements, inherited from customization. Two main decisions, relevant to design and manufacturing, are required for the proper implementation of mass customization. First, product features should be split between standard and customizable ones. This will position the product differentiation points. Second, processes should be split between make-to-stock and make-to-order. This will position the customer-order decoupling point. Most often, these two decisions are made separately. In this article, the authors advocate that both decisions should be made simultaneously. They propose an integrated method for design for mass customization. It is based on simultaneously evaluating the impact of these two criteria on enterprise and customer value through the modeling and simulation of value networks. A real case study on Alpina footwear industries is simulated and analyzed. The computational results highlight the joint impact of the two decisions on the overall performance. These two levers should then be considered, simultaneously, when designing the mass customization strategy.

Mass Customisation as a Competitive Factor for Sustainability

Mass customization (MC) is a rising paradigm. This is caused by the more demanding customers who seek uniqueness, and by all the available supporting technologies. Companies are interested in this strategy because they expect a competitive advantage and an increase of their profit. This paper provides first a short overview on what is MC, its classification and its implementation. The main challenge is, after defining the level of customization, to adapt the entire company to the MC strategy. Some concrete application is provided on European projects that aim to design tools and methods for implementing MC for enterprise sustainability.

Electromagnetic modular Smart Surface architecture and control in a microfactory context

Proposal of flexible and reconfigurable conveyance system for modular microfactory.Prototype of the associated technical solution for electromagnetic modular Smart Surface (emSS).Development of a framework to manage and control the electromagnetic modular Smart Surface within microfactory.First results on the displacement of one pallet on the electromagnetic modular Smart Surface and two studies exploiting the emSS modeling. This paper presents an electromagnetic conveyance system called electromagnetic modular Smart Surface (emSS) permitting to move pallets on a planar surface in a microfactory context. The proposed surface concept allows flexibility in reconfiguring the system layout along with product routing. The possibilities of accurate positioning of the moving pallet and controlling multiple pallets on the surface make the emSS suitable for reconfigurable and flexible manufacturing systems. However, the emSS control needs to be robust and scalable to adapt the changes in manufacturing systems. A framework is therefore defined to monitor and control the emSS by simulation or in-line. It allows to define product routing on the emSS by satisfying numerous requirements such as reduction in energy consumption, collision avoidance, etc., and to minimize the human interventions by changing product routing when emSS component failures occur. A first experiment realized on an emSS prototype, allowed to compare two paths strategies regarding cost function linked to energy consumption and velocities. Two other studies exploit the emSS modeling in terms of pallet path generation and simulation of collision avoidance.

Servicization of Product Lifecycle Management: Towards Service Lifecycle Management

Nowadays, many manufacturing industries are operating a process of servicization, id est the build-up of services to a product-centered offer. The implementation of service engineering into product-related activities requires a company to adapt to the new stakes on several levels, including strategic approaches and information systems. Therefore, Service Lifecycle Management (SLM), similarly to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) might be defined as a way to take into consideration these new stakes, enabling management of services in a holistic approach dealing with service data and their structure. Products and services can benefit from information exchanges from one to another. In the aeronautic industry, several companies have shown the relevancy of information spreading between product and service activities in a bidirectional manner. A serviced product is thus designed considering the use stage and its service operations, which permits the collection of valuable information to improve design processes. Nevertheless, there are few research works on the convergence of the solutions brought out by SLM and PLM. This paper analyses how those two strategic approaches might coincide with the Information System’s point of view in order to benefit from an effective interaction. A general analysis is presented at first. Then the paper focuses on the application of the paradigm of serviced products to the automotive industry.

Performance Factory in the context of mass customization

A novel performance measurement and assessment frame called Performance Factory (PerFact) applied on a specific example focussing on mass customization in the context of the Factory of the Future is presented in this work. PerFact operates target-oriented towards the mission and vision of the company by connecting the overall mission and vision via related requirements with the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their specific reference values. The performance is measured on manufactured customer-driven products, corresponding production processes and used resources. Furthermore, PerFact is able to monitor and assess the performance of both real production systems and simulated production scenarios. Moreover, the measurement system is balanced; it assesses the performance of the factory considering all perspectives relevant for each specific case.

An integrated closed-loop product lifecycle management approach for reverse logistics design

Abstract Nowadays, reverse logistics is gaining importance for many companies in different industries. This importance is rooted in the fact that it generates profit and decreases the environmental impacts of products. Even though the decrease of environmental impacts is an indispensable requisite, reverse logistics design is only driven by cost indicators. The main reason behind this high cost is access to environmental information is difficult and is directly linked to data all along the lifecycle of the product. This paper presents a method by which reverse logistics design integrates environmental impacts based on the management of closed-loop product lifecycle. This method is divided into two processes: from beginning of life to end of life and from end of life to beginning of life. The first process integrates product data in order to calculate environmental impacts of the potential reverse logistics networks, whereas the second process selects the most appropriate reverse logistics network before optimising the product based on this particular network. The proposition is illustrated by a case study on a recycled aluminium automotive part.

Value networks: pulling the triggers. A combined approach of modelling and simulation for performance evaluation

Existing approaches for modelling and simulation of value chain focus on the operational level. In this article, a combined approach of value network modelling and simulation for performance evaluation is proposed. It considers a strategic decision-making process taking into account high variability of products and customer-driven design and supply chain. Two case studies prove the implementability of the proposed method and tools.

Determining the CODP position by value network modeling and simulation

Mass customization has become a reality, and is implemented in many industries such as the shoe industry. Even though much work has been achieved until now in developing the tools and methodologies to support such a strategy, a lot has still to be done such as determining the customer order decoupling point (CODP) which is the breaking point between productions for stock based on forecast and customization based on customer demand. In this article, and under the European project DOROTHY, we propose the use of value network modeling and simulation for determining the position of the CODP based on its influence on the overall generated value of the MC system. Only the value network model as well as the modelling language and the general approach will be presented.