Industrialization as a key element of sustainable product-service solutions

Product-service systems are seen by many authors to offer potential for significant sustainability benefit. Manufacturing companies are said to be essential to such a change through their influence over product performance and over the use and end-of-life stages. Yet linking these stages such that the producer is incentivized to improve the performance of later stages is still a challenge. This paper argues for placing the producer at the centre of a new arrangement: by seeking to utilize the producer's knowledge of designing and the knowledge of volume production, through creation of platforms, while cooperating closely with other actors. The paper describes three case studies that have used such an approach to design and implement new food production systems. Based on 12 months of action research observations, 10 participating organizations from the cases were studied, and the implemented solutions assessed for environmental, economic and social performance. The results demonstrate a high level of sustainability benefit is achievable using platforms and partners to design product-service systems, while highlighting that changes to production arrangements are necessary but not sufficient to improve whole life-cycle environmental performance of product-service systems, and that producers need to cooperate closely with other actors to achieve the claimed benefits.

A Computer integrated unified modelling approach to responsive manufacturing

Computer modelling approaches have significant potential to enable decision-making about various aspects of responsive manufacturing. In order to understand the system prior to the selection of any responsiveness strategy, multiple process segments of organisations need to be modelled. The article presents a novel systematic approach for creating coherent sets of unified enterprise, simulation and other supporting models that collectively facilitate responsiveness. In this approach, enterprise models are used to explicitly define relatively enduring relationships between (i) production planning and control (PPC) processes, that implement a particular strategy and (ii) process-oriented elements of production systems, that are work loaded by the PPC processes. Coherent simulation models, can in part be derived from the enterprise models, so that they computer execute production system behaviours. In this way, time-based performance outcomes can be simulated; so that the impacts of alternative PPC strategies on the planning and controlling historical or forecasted patterns of workflow, through (current and possible future) production system models, can be analysed. The article describes the unified modelling approach conceived and its application in a furniture industry case study small and medium enterprise (SME). Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Building more sustainable solutions in production-consumption systems: the case of food for people with reduced access

In new product development, the ability to integrate different dimensions of sustainability at a value chain level is still a complex, problematic goal. As product-service approaches are increasingly enabling the introduction of more sustainable paths, this paper describes the authors' experience thus far when building insights into conditions for the implementation of integrated solutions in a process of co-development and testing in real life conditions, which are driven by a social need focusing on food for people with reduced access. Throughout this process, which brought together producers, consumers and other stakeholders to design and test industrialised, sustainable solutions, empirical evidence demonstrates feasibility and usefulness of the approach and insight into the conditions for implementing interactive, comprehensive multi-stakeholder processes in real life situations. In addition, results show that the delivery of innovative solutions enabled to offer social added value, economic profits and environmental improvements under specific experimental conditions. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.