Improving Reverse Logistics Processes Using Item-level Product Lifecycle Management

Abstract: Sustainability is a key issue for companies offering products and services on the global market. The ever-increasing worldwide demand for raw materials in combination with the rising costs for materials and energy challenges companies to make their products, processes and services more sustainable. More and more customers are demanding sustainable products and services due to their increased awareness about environmental protection. By providing access to data, information and knowledge about products and services the concept of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) can be applied to reverse logistics processes to improve sustainability. The term PLM and therefore the functionality of existing PLM systems must be considered as quite different. The paper introduces the concept of item-level Product Lifecycle Management. It investigates the requirements that item-level PLM systems must fulfill in order to support sustainability in reverse logistics processes in an appropriate manner. Existing item-level PLM solutions are then investigated according their suitability in the field of reverse logistics. Keywords: Item-Level Product Lifecycle Management, architecture, integration, item-level, sustainability, reverse logistic

Towards a Methodology for Selecting Product Usage Information Sources for the (Re-)Design of Product Service Systems

A product’s value is increasingly determined by the services supporting it. Complex Product-Service Systems (PSS) – combinations of services and products – are in demand. Product usage information (PUI), that is, information about how an individual product is used, is rapidly becoming a valuable asset to industry to help inform service offers throughout the product lifecycle. Conventionally, information about how a product is used is gathered in customer relations and MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) processes via channels such as repair logs, call centres or helpdesks. Today, new channels of PUI are emerging from the digitalization of products, the Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet PUI sources and social media. However, there is a lack of a methodological approach which companies use to select the right PUI source for the design of services, and vice-versa, to understand which value-added services can be offered using information already generated by sensors embedded into their products or available on the Internet or in social media. This contribution is intended to show an avenue of research towards such a methodology.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work publicCyber-Physical System