An activity-based modelling approach for assessing the key stakeholders' corporation in the eco-conscious design of electronic products
Titel:
An activity-based modelling approach for assessing the key stakeholders' corporation in the eco-conscious design of electronic products
Auteur:
Ge, Christine Ping Wang, Bo
Verschenen in:
Journal of engineering design
Paginering:
Jaargang 18 (2007) nr. 1 pagina's 55-71
Jaar:
2007-02
Inhoud:
With growing concerns on the environmental impact of electronic product development at a global scale, product developers are seeking better solutions both to comply with environmental regulations and to achieve economic growth in order to stay competitive. During the past decade, some of the most successful electronic product development companies have established their own Design for Environment (DfE) programmes. The DfE programmes are playing a more and more important role in addressing environmental concerns in the product development process. However, numerous industrial examples also reveal that the execution of the environment regulations often depends on whether a DfE programme can corporate effectively with other key eco-conscious design stakeholders, including the design group, supply chain management, and suppliers. In other words, both technical and political issues are involved in eco-conscious design practice. With little historical references to gain insight into these issues and, more importantly, to select an effective corporation strategy a priori, many firms are struggling in the darkness, and their struggle has created substantial obstacles for successfully delivering desired products. This has made it an urgency to have a systematic methodology to help understand the emerging problems in eco-conscious design in depth and make sensible decisions based on quantitative assessment capabilities. In our work, based on the existing experience-based work and our own experiences working with industries, the goal is to make a step along the direction of developing a systematic methodology to address these complex issues. The focus of this paper is on the following two aspects in developing electronic products. (1) Problem formulation: characterizing the corporation strategies among the DfE programme, design group, supply chain management, and suppliers to form an assessment basis for applying a systematic evaluation method, (2) Evaluation method: quantitatively evaluating the effectives of the corporation strategies in terms of the resulting environmental impact, product quality, and cost performances. The owners, contents, extent, and methods of information exchanged and shared among the different eco-conscious design stakeholders (i.e. information overlap) has been identified as a major factor to affect the effectiveness of their corporations. In the current implementation, only the owners and extent of information exchange is used to classify the corporations among the stakeholders as strategies. A three-view activity-based model developed in previous work by the authors is then adopted to model the design process/activities associated with a certain corporation strategy, and evaluate the resulting environmental impact, product quality, and cost performances of the design process/activities through the use of drivers. By combining the problem formation and evaluation method described earlier, a foundation framework for the targeted systematic methodology is constructed, and the prototype implementation methods are developed. A case study of electronic product design is used to demonstrate the use of the framework and prototype implementation methods for assessing the effectiveness of the corporation strategies among the key eco-conscious design stakeholders in a real-world situation. The presented work has potential to be further developed as a fully-fledged methodology for systematically assessing and selecting various corporation strategies that suits a product development firm's desired eco-conscious product design objectives.