When Product Life Cycle Meets Customer Activity Cycle

Manufacturing companies have traditionally focused their efforts on designing, developing and producing products to offer on the market. Today global competition and demands for greater company responsibility of products throughout their entire life cycle are driving manufacturing companies to shift market strategies from a transactional approach to an approach based on the establishment and management of customer relationships (Grönroos, 1999). A growing number of studies and research programmes have focused on the potentials of business strategies based on providing the value of utility of products throughout their life cycle by designing integrated solutions of products and services. This approach has been dubbed ‘product/service-systems (PSS)’ (Mont, 2004). Although relationship marketing and product/service-system design have their roots in each their own research fields - marketing and engineering design - it seems that the two approaches are complimentary. The principle behind PSS is a shift from a perception that value is mainly embedded in a physical artefact to a perception where the activities associated with the product are considered to be a better definition of value. In this new perspective value is created by supporting the customer’s activities related to the use of products. This is done through intangible services and knowledge intensification that ensures optimal operation and performance of products in relation to the individual customer’s activities. It is believed that PSS approaches can be a step on the path to sustainable development as this will enable and motivate companies to reuse, rationalise and enhance their products and services more efficiently throughout their life phases (Manzini & Vezzoli, 2002). Based on a year’s participation and observation in a development project in a global office furniture manufacturer, this paper attempts to uncover how a manufacturing company is making the move from selling office furniture to selling the benefit of workspace performance. A significant insight is that the definition of value is core to both relationship marketing and PSS approaches. Viewing products alone are not appropriate to determine value – instead the focus should be on the effects from customer activities. This paper presents its findings in relation to a theoretical framework of the expected managerial and organisational implications of PSS (Tan et al, 2007). The framework takes into consideration new activities, roles and responsibilities, knowledge and competencies, as well as value network relationships that the company will have to deal with when adopting a PSS approach. The observations in the case study support the notion that PSS and relationship marketing are similar approaches that might be well suited for manufacturing firms when employed in combination

Graphene made easy: high quality, large-area samples

We show that by using an original method, bulk graphite can be bonded onto borosilicate glass or potentially any insulating substrate with ionic conductivity and then cleaved off to leave single or few layer graphene on the substrate, identified optically and with Raman spectroscopy. This simple, inexpensive and fast method leads to the preparation of large area graphene and single or few-layer films of layered materials in general. We have prepared mm size few-layer graphene samples and also measured I-V characteristics in a FET. This opens up perspectives both for fundamental research as well as for applications.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures,Solid State Communications, In pres

Educating engineering designers for a multidisciplinary future

Contemporary companies on a global market are experiencing constantly changing business demands and increased competition. Increasing focus in product development is now put on issues like understanding users and their needs, the context where users’ activities take place and creating sustainable solutions (McAloone, et.al., 2007). In manufacturing companies, engineering designers play a significant role in realising what is captured in these words.Future engineering designers will hold wider responsibilities for such tasks (McAloone, et.al., 2007; Larsson, et.al., 2005), thus challenging current engineering design education. Educating engineering designers today significantly differs from traditional engineering education (McAloone, et.al., 2007). However, a broader view of design activities gains little attention. The project course Product/Service-Systems, which is coupled to the lecture based course Product life and Environmental issues at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the master programme in Product Development at the Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden, are both curriculums with a broader view than traditional (mechanical) engineering design. Based on these two representatives of a Scandinavian approach, the purpose in this presentation is to describe two ways of educating engineering designers to enable them to develop these broader competencies of socio-technical aspects of engineering design. Product Development at LTU A process, called Participatory Product Innovation (P2I) underpins the master programme Product Development and originates from the Design for Wellbeing (DfW) framework (Larsson, et.al., 2005). This is an inclusive framework which seeks to bring together business, human issues and technology in a comprehensive approach to support the creation of tomorrow’s innovations. A main principle is that many different disciplines should contribute to spur innovation by collaboration across disciplines (Larsson, et.al., 2007). The P2I process starting position is in Needfinding (Patnaik and Becker, 1999), were the students conduct observations and interviews to gain access to ualities in the users’ context. An identified challenge here is to keep people in view and not jump into conclusions, i.e., to understand a situation perceived by its actors as problematic and to widen the design space. Product/Service-Systems at DTU Besides the teaching of traditional engineering skills, the curriculum for the project course aims to build up multidisciplinary competences such as understanding the socio technical aspects of product design and synthesis of products and delivery systems. The students are assigned to redesign an existing physical product, such as a washing machine, and turn it into a product/service-system. The main objective for the project is that the resulting solution should have a substantially lower environmental impact whilst maintaining a similar functional performance as the initial product. The student teams are first guided through an analysis of the initial product’s product life cycle, yielding insights into four aspects of product design:1. indentification of current environmental impacts, 2. life phase systems the product encounters, 3. activities that involve the human actor (i.e. customer) and the product, 4. actor-network that support and supply these activities throughout the product’s life. Based on the analysis, goals are set for the improved solution and concepts are developed for a new product/service-system. This way the students are lead through engineering and socio-technical analysis tasks and thereby laying the foundation for their synthesis work in the concept development phase of the project. Concluding Remark By emphasising socio technical aspects in a process model or in a project course, the students are more likely to consider users, their context and sustainable solutions. This we see as essential competencies in product/service-system design and functional product development. References Larsson, A., Larsson, T., Leifer, L., Van der Loos, M., Feland, J. (2005), Design for Wellbeing: Innovations for People, In proceedings of 15th International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED 05, August 15-18, Melbourne, Australia.McAloone, T.C., Andreasen, M.M., Boelskifte, P. (2007), A Scandinavian Model of Innovative Product Development, In Proccedings of the 17th CIRP Design Conference, Springer-Verlag, Berlin. Patnaik, D., Becker, R. (1999), Needfinding: The Why and How of Uncovering People’s Needs, Design Management Journal, 10 (2), 37-43.Godkänd; 2007; 20071201 (tobias)Fastelaboratoriet - VINNEX