The Cornerstone of Sustainability Strategy in Manufacturing Enterprises

Sustainability has already been seen to impact positively the competitive advantage of an enterprise. Nonetheless managing sustainability still too often represents a conundrum. Consequently, the aim of this article is to help managers of manufacturing enterprises to understand, from an integrative perspective, the impact of the concept of sustainability onto their enterprise, with the objective to increase their long-term success. Thus, it was first assayed, if sustainability is a strategy and what are its main characteristics. To ensure validity, we leaned on the most renowned definitions of “strategy”. Secondly, an integrative framework for sustainability in manufacturing enterprises was designed, depicting the interrelations among the enterprise’s core elements (strategies, tactics, operations) and also with the environment (legislature and market), while dedicating special attention the concept of “fit”. The results altogether creates the cornerstone of the strategy of sustainability for manufacturing enterprises

Servitization of the Manufacturer’s Value Chain

Part III: Sustainable ServicesInternational audienceServitization, the offering of product-services, is a more and more pervasive concept. When applied correctly, it exploits the product and generates additional added value for the manufacturer as for the customer. Until now, servitization has been applied only onto the usage phase of the product, creating services around it. However the product is not the only valuable and tradable asset in a manufacturing enterprise. Therefore this article scrutinizes the possibility to additionally exploit the manufacturer’s value chain, by servitizing its components and hence transforming them into products per se. To test this possibility Thoben’s seminal representation of servitization was taken and applied onto the components of the value chain identified by Porter. It was elucidated that the proposed concept is feasible and under certain circumstances, it increases the seller’s and buyer’s sustainable competitive advantage. The article concludes by questioning the effect of this novel concept onto sustainability

Information – The Hidden Value of Servitization

Part III: Sustainable ServicesInternational audienceToday, in a product-service offering, the product and its related services can represent two main sources of revenue streams for the manufacturer. Tomorrow, information deriving from servitization and exploited on an ecosystem level, could represent the third one, whereas due to their ample potential in sharp market value increase, they could even become the manufacturer’s main revenue stream. This article of explorative nature questions the possibility to introduce such disruptive approach. In order to do so, servitization is evinced through a new perspective, through information. In order to exploit this new potential, the concept of an information ecosystem is introduced. Secondly, a new role is proposed, helping manufacturers to span the boundary between product and service. To depict the impact of the introduced concepts while positioning it in relevant literature, a third layer of added value was added to Thoben’s representation of servitization levels [1], the information layer

Upgrading the Data2Action Framework: Results Deriving from Its Application in the Printing Industry

This paper describes the application of the Data2Action (D2A) framework for the development of Smart Print Services. The context for the development was printing-as-a-service in Italy. The firm in this study wanted to create new Smart Services to improve customer experience and drive out waste. The analysis in this paper is based on an Action Research methodology to understand the application of the D2A framework. The results describe the lessons learnt from its implementation, show examples of tools used and reflect on the application of the framework and the individual tools. Using reflections from the development process, an improved framework is proposed that further increases its applicability for use in complex product service systems

Performance measurement and KPIs for remanufacturing

© 2015 Graham et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.The paper provides a brief background to remanufacturing and the general use of Performance Measurement and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) before introducing selected and newly formulated KPIs designed specifically for remanufacturing. Their relationships with the remanufacturing challenges faced by two contrasting remanufacturing businesses and the wider reman industry are described in detail. Subsets of KPIs forming a ‘Balanced Scorecard’ for each of the two remanufacturing cases conclude the paper. They arise through close working with Centro Ricerche FIAT (CRF) and SKF, and are triangulated by literature review and wider expert interviews. The two businesses represent contrasting remanufacturing scenarios: well-established high-volume low-margin automotive engine remanufacturing by the OEM ( >1000 units per year, < €10 k per unit) verses low-volume high-value wind turbine gearbox reman by an independent start-up ( < 100 units per year, > €100 k per unit). The 10 general production engineering KPIs selected for the reman KPI toolbox are as follows: Work In Progress (WIP), Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), Lead Time (LT), Cycle Time (CT), Hours Per Unit (HPU), Product Margin (PM), Quotation Accuracy (QA), Number of Concessions (NC), Number of managed mBOMs (BOM), and Personnel Saturation (PS). The Eco KPIs selected are: Material Used (MU), Recycled Material Used (RMU), Direct Energy Consumption (ECD), Indirect Energy Consumption (ECI), Water Withdrawal (WW), Green House Gas emissions (GHG), Total Waste (TW) by weight. The 8 Remanufacturing KPIs compiled and formulated as part of this research are: Core / Product Ratio (CPR), Core / Product Value Ratio (CPV), New Component Costs (NCC), Component Salvage Rate (SRC), Product Salvage Rate (SRP), Core Disposal Rate (CDR), Core Class Accuracy (CCA), and Core Class Distribution (CCD)

An Approach for a Quality-Based Test of Industrial Smart Service Concepts

Using machine data for improving the service business offers new potentials for differentiation to manufacturing firms. However, the development of industrial Smart Service concepts is a rather complex task: Different elements (e.g. technologies, digital services and personal services) have to be considered together and customer requirements for these new offers are often unknown. In this context, testing the newly developed Smart Service concepts can help manufacturing companies to avoid development failures and to ensure their value. The focus of our paper is to introduce a new approach for testing industrial Smart Service concepts on their perceived quality for potential customers. The approach includes a process model, an evaluation framework that includes criteria derived from existing approaches and specific Smart Service items