Product Design Should Consider the Life – and End of Life

The last two articles I’ve written for the APICS magazine “Enterprise Insights” department (to be published in the January/February 2010 and March/April 2010 issues), deal with “green” and “sustainability”. In the second one, I wrote about designing a product with its end-of-life in mind – reuse, reprocessing, recycling, and responsible disposal. Coincidentally, the following item appeared in the SME Daily Executive Briefing on December 29, 2009:

Considering "End Of Life" Issues For Electronics Could Benefit Manufacturers.
The Chicago Tribune (12/28, Hopkins) reported on "Harrison Kim, an assistant professor in the University of Illinois Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at Urbana-Champaign." Kim studied the lifecycles of electronic gadgets and the associated costs, "and found that the time to think about...'end of life' issues is before the small electronics are even designed." Specifically, Kim "analyzed how design differences affect product recovery and determined that manufacturers are losing money by not reusing components." Fewer than 5 percent of retired phones "are recycled or reused." Kim said, "These are profits currently neglected." One way manufacturers could benefit, he said, is by designing products that were modular. Such products would also "appeal to the environmentally-savvy consumer."

There are regulations in Europe – RoHS and WEEE – that govern the electronics industry with specific requirements for recycling and safe disposal. You can be sure that the same kind of regulation will be implemented in the U.S. in the foreseeable future and similar regulation will apply to other industries as well as electronics. Why not get ahead of the game and start thinking about end-of-life in products you are designing today? Chances are good that this effort will pay off in future compliance as well as enhancing your image with an increasingly “green” oriented customer base. Read more articles by Dave Turbide at www.daveturbide.com or click here

Getting Green

The heart of the ‘green’ movement is reducing waste and doing what you can to save resources. Sound familiar? It should; that’s what resource management professionals have been focused on for many years. And that’s what ERP and related systems are focused on as well. So, if you are using ERP to reduce waste and make your operations more efficient, you’re already going green.

In addition to being fashionable and increasingly required by regulatory agencies and customers, green makes good business sense. For example, you are all aware of what has happened to energy prices over the last couple years – anything you can do to reduce energy use is both green and a money saver as well. The same logic applies to other resource preserving activities.

There’s another dimension to green – emphasis toward ‘renewable’ resources. There’s good news here, too, although it may not come right away. Renewable, in many cases, means not petroleum-based. While paper, soy bean, corn and other substitutes might be more expensive in the short term, it’s likely that they will be less volatile and there is a distinct marketing advantage to being able to say that you have eliminated or greatly reduced non-renewable content. It’s likely you’ll be forced in that direction eventually – either through shortages, regulatory pressures or customer demands.

One other aspect of the green movement that you should start thinking about is the content and origin labeling requirements that retailers, customers and regulatory agencies are becoming more interested in. New and evolving labeling requirements mandate that content and origin are traceable through the entire supply chain, so even if you are a second or third tier (or lower) supplier, your customers will be asking you for this information so they can pass it up the line. Compliance will certainly put additional strain on your procurement department and your database. To read more articles for manufacturing professionals go to www.daveturbide.com