Juan Manuel Jauregui Becker

Prioritizing "Design for Recyclability" Guidelines, Bridging the Gap between Recyclers and Product Developers

This paper presents a Design For eXcellence (DFX) method for recyclability, resulting in a practical tool for product engineers. The tool enables an assessment of concept products as well as existing products and focuses on small domestic appliances recycled by shredding. The method enables quantifying recyclability performances of products by integrating a set of design guidelines, a recycling performance evaluation method, and prioritized improvement suggestions. After having the method implemented into a design support tool, a number of tests were executed. The preliminary tests of the method yield promising results, meeting expert expectations.

SUPPORTING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AT TECH STARTUPS WITH LEAN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Startups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) are the backbone of the European society, accounting for 67.1% of the total employment. One of the main common challenges for startups is product development (PD). While the Lean PD (LPD) approach has been proved effective in bigger companies, very few work was done related to SME and particularly to startups. In this work, a survey was sent to 104 Dutch tech startups. The results from the 26 respondents supported identifying a set of opportunities and challenges on reframing lean to startups.

A Template for Design for eXcellence (DfX) Methods

Design for eXcellence (DfX) entails a wide range of goal specific design methods targeting different phases of a product’s lifecycle. These methods are often not standardized and sometimes even have contradicting rules among them. As a consequence, design processes experience an increase in organizational entropy. This paper presents a template for DfX methods. The goal is to assist the industry in setting up lean design processes. The results of this research are threefold: (1) standardization of DfX design tasks and information flows, (2) facilitating the implementation of DfX methods and (3) enable benchmarking of DfX methods to purify design processes