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

The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy

Reductionism has dominated science and philosophy for centuries. Complexity has recently shown that interactions---which reductionism neglects---are relevant for understanding phenomena. When interactions are considered, reductionism becomes limited in several aspects. In this paper, I argue that interactions imply non-reductionism, non-materialism, non-predictability, non-Platonism, and non-nihilism. As alternatives to each of these, holism, informism, adaptation, contextuality, and meaningfulness are put forward, respectively. A worldview that includes interactions not only describes better our world, but can help to solve many open scientific, philosophical, and social problems caused by implications of reductionism.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Work relations and the multiple dimensions of the work-life boundary: Hairstyling at home

This article proposes a multidimensional approach to analysis of the work-life boundary and examines the affects of particular social and organizational relations on the preservation or porous-ness of different dimensions. In line with Nippert-Eng (1996), it is suggested that different dimensions of the boundary are reinforced or weakened by different social and organizational pressures. Analysis describes a specific type of multidimensional breaching – instances when work is taken outside of the worksite (spatial breaching) and is carried out outside of work-time (temporal breaching). Empirical research was conducted among hairstylists working in salons and barbershops in a city in the North of England. Because of the nature of the tasks involved in hairstyling – that the skills involved are widely exchangeable and so may be employed in extra-work environments and temporalities – hairstylists provide a nice site for investigating the circumstances when this does (or does not) occur. Data collection involved a comprehensive self-completion survey of salons and barbershops in the city (response rate: 40%; N=132) and semi-structured interviews with 70 stylists working in 52 salons or barbershops. Findings demonstrate that work relations (hairstylists’ structural relations of production – whether a worker is an owner-proprietor, chair-renter, on-commission stylist, basic-only stylist, or trainee) are critical in determining both workers’ ability and desire to resist the seepage of work into their social lives as well as the particular dimensions of the boundary that are breached. This is because work relations affect the relative importance of four identified motivations for taking work out of the salon (income production; training; inter-personal reciprocity rooted in social relations; and inter-personal reciprocity rooted in the workplace)

Teleworking practice in small and medium-sized firms: Management style and worker autonomy

In an empirical study of teleworking practices amongst small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in West London, organisational factors such as management attitudes, worker autonomy and employment flexibility were found to be more critical than technological provision in facilitating successful implementation. Consequently, we argue that telework in most SMEs appears as a marginal activity performed mainly by managers and specialist mobile workers

Product Differentiation Costs and Global Competition

The growing competitive intensity on the markets determines the emergence of competition costs that are expressed at a corporate level and have implicit repercussions for the supply system. This type of costs makes it possible to identify a close link between competition costs and supply differentiation costs. Classification by competitive intensity presupposes that the analysis performed identifies the classification of company costs as the discriminating element, in terms of the competitive pressure of the context in which the firm operates. The emergence of competition costs is linked to an attempt to squeeze them as an aspect of vertical, or more specifically, horizontal cooperation strategies.Product Differentiation; Differentiation Costs; Over-Supply; Global Competition; Marketing; Market-Driven Management; Global Corporations; Global Markets DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.4468/2005.1.06garbelli

Control and Supervision of Wind Energy Conversion Systems

This paper is about a PhD thesis and includes the study and analysis of the performance of an onshore wind energy conversion system. First, mathematical models of a variable speed wind turbine with pitch control are studied, followed by the study of different controller types such as integer-order controllers, fractional-order controllers, fuzzy logic controllers, adaptive controllers and predictive controllers and the study of a supervisor based on finite state machines is also studied. The controllers are included in the lower level of a hierarchical structure composed by two levels whose objective is to control the electric output power around the rated power. The supervisor included at the higher level is based on finite state machines whose objective is to analyze the operational states according to the wind speed. The studied mathematical models are integrated into computer simulations for the wind energy conversion system and the obtained numerical results allow for the performance assessment of the system connected to the electric grid. The wind energy conversion system is composed by a variable speed wind turbine, a mechanical transmission system described by a two mass drive train, a gearbox, a doubly fed induction generator rotor and by a two level converter