Sustainable product development strategies: Business planning and performance implications

Copyright © 2012 by Institution of Mechanical Engineers. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Manufacturing firms are under many financial and competitive pressures which focus attention on the performance of their manufacturing processes. In this paper the opportunities for improving the environmental impact of products within the constraints of existing manufacturing infrastructure are examined. Approaches which support sustainability in two aspects are proposed, firstly, the provision of products to the users in ways which extend the product life and secondly, manufacturing approaches which reduce resource usage. This paper outlines three different sustainable development strategies for different product types and describes the cost implications for manufacturers across the life-cycle. The performance measures affected by these strategies are examined drawing on product development case studies from a number of high technology sectors to highlight the different approaches taken. The results are intended to aid manufacturers during the earliest stages of business planning to consider alternative product development approaches which are more sustainable

Making space for experiences

Leisure and retail providers need to understand the elements of the visitor experience and the way in which they evaluate their satisfaction. This article suggests a holistic prism model of the interaction between the management and the visitor in a leisure space. This is applied to a netnographic study of visitors to a folk festival to illustrate the interconnectiveness of the different attributes causing dissatisfaction. It found that the physical and operational attributes were evaluated not through a checklist of individual features but as hindrances to the visitor's desire to make best use of the time. Visitors also evaluated the experience in the light of their own values and concerns, passing judgement on the values communicated by the management. At the heart of the experience was the enjoyment of choosing from an abundant offer and discovering something new. The main attraction is often only the pretext for enjoying the company of friends so places to meet before and chill-out afterwards are vital to the experience. The distinctiveness of the setting, the food and drink can become the sensory cues which give the event or location its uniqueness. The challenge to retail and leisure organisations is to design these elements of a memorable experience into their offerings

Prozessmanagement als Gestaltungshebel der digitalen Transformation?

Bietet das Hype-Thema «digitale Transformation» die Chance, Prozessmanagement in ein ganz neues Licht zu rücken? Ist Prozessmanagement vielleicht sogar eine wesentliche Voraussetzung, um den digitalen Wandel zielgenauer zu gestalten? Oder wird Prozessmanagement im Zeitalter der selbstorganisierenden Teams und Customer Journeys letztlich überflüssig? Nicht nur Branchen, sondern auch Managementdisziplinen sind herausgefordert, sich mit der Relevanz der digitalen Transformation zu beschäftigen, sich neu zu ordnen, sich besser zu verzahnen und sich letztlich zu wandeln. Ziel der Business-Process-Management-Studie 2016, mit der das Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik der Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, School of Management and Law seit 2011 regelmässig Status quo und Best Practices im deutschsprachigen Raum erhebt, war es, die Rolle des Prozessmanagements als Gestaltungshebel der digitalen Transformation zu beleuchten

Experiential aspects of tourism gift consumption

This article addresses how consumers make use of fantasy, feelings, and fun when deciding, giving, and consuming gifts of tourism and leisure. Despite little industry awareness, consumers are engaging with such behaviour because tourism gifts offer considerable scope for the creative expression of donor–recipient relationships. This UK-based interpretive qualitative study captured data from donors, recipients, and tourism and leisure providers. The feelings (emotions), fantasies (imagination and dreaming), and fun (playfulness) were interrogated through the behavioural phases of gift decision making, gift exchange, post-exchange, and gift consumption. A range of emotions were displayed by donors and recipients at different stages in the gift-giving process; donor decision making in groups for created gifts was particularly charged. Fantasies were evident both for donors planning gifts and for recipients. As an intangible gift, means of exchange allowed for creative mechanisms beyond the classic wrapping strategies associated with physical gifts. The ‘decoy’ strategy stimulated the recipient’s imagination to conjure fantastical scenarios. Fun or playfulness was built into many of the gifts and often related to an element of ‘surprise’, an attribute of the perfect gift (e.g. Belk, 1996) in Western societies

An analytical framework for evaluating the value of enhanced customisation: an integrated operations-marketing perspective

In this paper we present a formal approach to evaluate the value of enhanced customisation. The suggested approach is based on a new perspective addressing the important alignment between the operations and marketing functions, under which we are able to obtain a more holistic understanding of the extent to which enhanced customisation may influence profitability. The model we develop captures the interaction between several factors including the inventory level, number of product variety, price, and delivery lead time. The numerical findings provide insights regarding some important aspects that may inhibit as well as facilitate the progress towards the manufacturing concept with a greater degree of personalised offerings

Design agency:prototyping multi-agent systems in architecture

This paper presents research on the prototyping of multi-agent systems for architectural design. It proposes a design exploration methodology at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and computer science. The motivation of the work includes exploring bottom up generative methods coupled with optimizing performance criteria including for geometric complexity and objective functions for environmental, structural and fabrication parameters. The paper presents the development of a research framework and initial experiments to provide design solutions, which simultaneously satisfy complexly coupled and often contradicting objectives. The prototypical experiments and initial algorithms are described through a set of different design cases and agents within this framework; for the generation of façade panels for light control; for emergent design of shell structures; for actual construction of reciprocal frames; and for robotic fabrication. Initial results include multi-agent derived efficiencies for environmental and fabrication criteria and discussion of future steps for inclusion of human and structural factors

Quantitative imaging of concentrated suspensions under flow

We review recent advances in imaging the flow of concentrated suspensions, focussing on the use of confocal microscopy to obtain time-resolved information on the single-particle level in these systems. After motivating the need for quantitative (confocal) imaging in suspension rheology, we briefly describe the particles, sample environments, microscopy tools and analysis algorithms needed to perform this kind of experiments. The second part of the review focusses on microscopic aspects of the flow of concentrated model hard-sphere-like suspensions, and the relation to non-linear rheological phenomena such as yielding, shear localization, wall slip and shear-induced ordering. Both Brownian and non-Brownian systems will be described. We show how quantitative imaging can improve our understanding of the connection between microscopic dynamics and bulk flow.Comment: Review on imaging hard-sphere suspensions, incl summary of methodology. Submitted for special volume 'High Solid Dispersions' ed. M. Cloitre, Vol. xx of 'Advances and Polymer Science' (Springer, Berlin, 2009); 22 pages, 16 fig

What we stand for: Reputation platforms in Scandinavian higher education

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