Product Life Cycle Considerations Research Articles

Service withdrawal: The uncertain future of the games-as-a-service model

The last decade has seen a rapid growth of service-based offerings – also known as Game-as-a-Service or GaaS – in the video game industry, among which are some of the most popular franchises, such as Fortnite or League of Legends. Yet, even though these games are designed to be played and supported for an indefinite period of time, many studios have recently chosen to curtail services after introducing them, making for unclear outlooks on the future of this business model. Hence, based on secondary sources – including company documents, industry press and dedicated player forums – this multiple case study sets out to investigate the reasons behind studios’ decision to discontinue parts of five popular GaaS. Three main motives for withdrawing services emerge from the cases. Namely, rather than supporting services, studios decide to (1) attend to the company, to (2) attend to players and (3) to attend to the core product itself. The results contribute to the nascent GaaS literature, in particular with respect to business models and product-life cycle considerations. Implications for studios are offered in closing.

Learning Factories and Sustainable Engineering—Competencies for Students and Industrial Workforce

Sustainability and the circular economy are becoming increasingly important for industry and academia. Learning factories at higher education institutions around the globe attempt to educate students and industrial workers on these topics through specially developed training modules. To successfully implement measures to mitigate issues, such as climate change, product life cycle considerations—in which different phases may require different worker competencies—are indispensable. In this context, we provide some evaluation of learning factory use cases regarding sustainability. The use cases are evaluated on product life cycle phases and respective worker sustainability and circular economy competencies. The results show that the majority of the use cases focus on the production life cycle phase; product development, product use, and end-of-life have either not or very rarely been addressed. Our general conclusions and implications relate to these findings with a recommendation that learning factories expand their training capabilities.

CO2 footprint for distribution oil immersed transformers according to ISO 14067:2018

In the last few decades, climate change and the global warming have emerged as important environmental issues. The cause of global warming is the increase of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). There are several greenhouse gases responsible for global warming: water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxides, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and others. They are mostly the result of the fossil fuels' combustion in cars, buildings, factories, and power plants. The gas responsible for the most of the global warming is carbon dioxide (CO2). This increase in the greenhouse gas emissions leads to a greater interest of the consumers, board management and stakeholders in the environmental impact of their activities, products and services.The verification of the Carbon Footprint of distribution oil immersed transformer, presented in this paper, was recognized as an opportunity for the company to understand its own environmental impact and to identify inefficiencies and opportunities within its business.Carbon Footprint of a Product (CFP) is a rather new term closely related to the greenhouse gas emissions. The CFP is considered as a total of the greenhouse emissions generated during the life cycle of a product – that is, from raw material acquisition or generation from natural resources to a final disposal. It is described within the standard ISO 14067:2018 Carbon footprint of products – Requirements and guidelines for quantification [1]. This standard belongs to the environmental series ISO 14000 and enables the organization to demonstrate its environmental responsibility.Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), as well as the Carbon Footprint of products together with environmental impact of the product, are shown in this paper in accordance with standard ISO 14067:2018. The LCA is a method for the quantification of the environmental impacts of individual products. It takes into account a complete life cycle, starting from a raw material production, until the product’s final disposal or materials’ recycling in accordance with ISO 14040 [2] and ISO 14044 [3]. Greenhouse gases are expressed in mass-based CO2 equivalents (CO2e), which is the unit of measurement in the ISO 14067:2018 standard. The functional unit in ISO 14067:2018 can be either a product or a service. In this paper, the functional unit was the product – oil immersed distribution transformer, in four product variations. The LCA scope used in the preparation of this study was "cradle to gate" – it covers the CFP from the acquisition of the raw materials ("cradle") up to dispatch from the factory ("gate").The objectives of product life cycle considerations in Končar D&ST Inc. are to reduce the use of natural resources and emissions to the environment, as well as to improve social performance at different stages of the product life cycle.By linking the economic and ecological dimension of the production, different aspects during realization of product in all phases of the life cycle come together. In this way company achieves cleaner products and processes, competitive advantage in the market and improved platform that will meet the needs of the changing business climate.Lifecycle thinking is based on the principles of reducing environmental impacts at the beginning of product creation, giving a wider picture of material and energy flow and ultimately environmental pollution prevention. These principles are organized in Končar D&ST Inc. internally by planning and introducing cleaner manufacturing processes, environmental protection management and eco-design.Incorporating ISO 14067:2018 into company business is recognized as an opportunity for transparent communication to interested parties, incorporating CO2 emissions into annual reports and as a baseline information for a first step towards managing carbon emissions.

A Study on Recycle Schedules for Trade-In Rebates With Consideration of Product Life Cycle

Firms can appropriately recycle used products to not only save material costs, but also bring back customers to make repurchases. However, customers may return their used products at any time and in any condition, and firms may thus be unable to fully utilize the returned items in their remanufacturing activities. This study considers a firm that actively recycles its current product, and then sells both new and remanufactured items to the market to compete against a mainstream product produced by a large-scale rival firm, and proposes a two-stage model in which the current product is sold in the first stage and is then recycled in the second stage. The optimal pricing strategy for the current product under competition is determined for the sales stage. With regard to the recycling stage, consumer utility and product remaining value are considered to estimate the probability that customers would return their used products, which can then be remanufactured within the product life cycle. Two different recycling approaches for trade-in rebates are considered to collect used products, fixed timing recycling and continuous period recycling, to investigate their effects on the remanufacturing profitability. Under the assumptions of duopoly market and the two recycling approaches for trade-in rebates, the results indicate that when collecting used products at a fixed time point, the conditions of used products should be a significant concern, and when recycling in a continuous period, appropriately setting a starting timing for collecting used products on the market would be beneficial to the firm.

Low-carbon product design for product life cycle

Product design stage has a profound impact on a product's carbon footprint in its life cycle. Existing low-carbon design approaches are either not able to achieve low-carbon design solutions in product life cycle or prone to a loss of optimal solutions with the consideration of product life cycle. At each stage of product life cycle, there are several alternative design solutions, which can provide extra design space and bring more opportunities for low-carbon design. In this paper, a feature-based carbon footprint element model is proposed to estimate the carbon footprint at each stage of product life cycle. A five-layer weighted directed graph-based life cycle decision space is also proposed to represent the alternative life cycle paths. The low-carbon design process is to search the design solution with the lowest carbon footprint based on the mapping between design solution space and life cycle decision space. The proposed design process is to provide an integrated approach to enumerate and combine alternative solutions at each stage of product life cycle. The low-carbon design of a cold heading machine is given as an example to demonstrate the design methodology.

A Green Supply Chain Design with Product Life Cycle Considerations

Due to rising consciousness in recent decades about environmental protection, many issues related to green supply chain management have been discussed by businesses and governments at all levels. Different from traditional supply chain management, green supply chain management concerns itself with environmental impacts and material utilization issues, which make the selection of the supply chain actors a more complicated decision than usual. However, the procedure of selecting the supply chain actors is strongly guided by the product life cycle.This article emphasizes the importance of taking into account the product life cycle in a green supply chain design and suggests a way to do so.

Generic Framework for Conceptual Design Using Concurrent Engineering Strategy. A Case Study: Advanced Material Application Product Development of Metal Matrix Composite Component

One of the keys to success for product competition in the market depends on the effectiveness of its product development. This article presents a generic framework of product development which focuses on the conceptual design. The framework is developed with concurrent engineering strategy where it takes into account the product life cycle considerations within the early phases of the conceptual design. The proposed framework starts from product investigation, product specification and conceptual design. Implementation of the framework is illustrated on a case study of metal matrix composite brake disc rotor design, where there is an avenue for conceptual research since the progress of metal matrix composite utilisation in the automotive industry is limited due to their high cost in comparison with conventional alloy. The possible outcome for product investigation, product specification and conceptual design of metal matrix composite brake disc rotor are presented as part of the selection of best conceptual design. Moreover, the proposed framework is an aid to help engineers and designers to make an effective and systematic product development through a sound conceptual design decision from possible product concept alternatives.

A Supply Risk Reduction Model Using Integrated Multicriteria Decision Making

Risk management in supply chains is receiving increasing attention in both academia and industry. Firms are recognizing the importance of considering supply risk in evaluating and selecting suppliers for strategic partnerships. One of the critical issues faced by purchasing managers is in effectively defining, operationalizing, and incorporating supply risk measures in the supplier evaluation process. Due to the multidimensional nature of supply risk, analytical tools that can effectively integrate various risk measures into the decision process can prove useful for managers. To this end, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we consider extant research in supply risk in developing a framework for risk assessment based on various categories and types of risks. Second, we propose a combination of analytic hierarchy process and goal programming as a decision tool for supplier selection in the presence of risk measures and product life cycle considerations. The efficacy of the model is tested at a mid-sized automotive supplier and managerial implications are discussed.

Development of an automatic design and optimization system for industrial silencers

Current computer-aided design (CAD) software tools focus on rapid production of computer models, which usually takes place after the product design is completed. The product design process, which has more significant influence on product life-cycle costs, is not fully supported. This work documents the development of an automatic design and optimization system for industrial silencers. The developed system greatly reduces the silencer design time from one day to a few minutes. Moreover, the system proves the feasibility of developing an open-architecture CAD system supported by design of experiment (DOE) based optimization methods to integrate product life-cycle considerations into the design. It is expected that the developed system can help the development of similar systems for other products. Through the development of this system, some further research issues are identified.

Product life-cycle considerations and the nature of strategic activities in entrepreneurial firms

This article reports on the nature of strategic activities and concerns reported by the CEOs of 77 entrepreneurial manufacturing firms once initial success in their marketplace had been achieved. Once the entrepreneurial firm achieves initial market success, the rate and number of strategic decisions faced by the entrepreneurs rapidly expand. A product becomes a product line. Product lines are added. Facilities and equipment are expanded. Personnel are added. A more formal and interpersonally complex organization becomes necessary. Markets and distribution channels expand, adding uncertainty to key market-related decisions. New financial risks arise, often as the result of undercapitalized cash flows. All of these factors combine to dramatically increase the pressure on the entrepreneur's strategic decision making. A major factor underlying the complicity inherent in this scenario is the product/market life cycle: the entrepreneurs must now organize and make decisions regarding several product lines that span several life-cycle stages with different strategic concerns, rather than regarding the narrow product range and limited life-cycle position that provided their initial success. The research reported in this article examined the relative importance of ten strategic activities and concerns reported by the 77 CEOs across products at different life-cycle stages. Initial interviews with selected CEOs and a review of the strategic-management literature identified ten key factors shaping the firm's evolving decision-making practices. These ten factors were divided into three groups: 1. 1. Operational concerns that necessitate strategic attention: 1) changes in product design; 2) changes in process design; 3) risk of producing a product; and 4) emphasis on creativity. 2. 2. Dimensions influencing a firm's strategic-management activities: 5) demand on the strategic manager's time: 6) speed of decision making; 7) problems of internal politics; and 8) environmental uncertainty. 3. 3. Fundamental assumptions underlying a firm's decision-making practices: 9) annual-profit potential; and 10) value of strategic planning. There are two main sets of results: First, four process-related factors (value of strategic planning, demand on CEO's time, speed of decision making and annual-profit potential) were consistently the most important factors affecting performance within eact stage. Regardless of the life cycle of a particular product line, the manner or process by which decisions were made (strategic planning, CEO's time, and speed of decision making) and one key assumption or objective-annual-profit potential-were seen as factors more important in affecting performance than were operating concerns that necessitated strategic attention. Second, strategic issues associated with product lines at the development and growth stages of their life cycle are reported to be significantly more important to CEOs in entrepreneurial manufacturing firms than are strategic issues associated with mature or declining products lines. These results suggest that CEOs in entrepreneurial manufacturing firms should re-examine their strategies and practices to be sure that sufficient “strategic attention” is being given to decisions regarding mature product lines. In addition, these CEO's need to ensure, in the face of constant demands for their time and decisions, that operating concerns requiring strategic attention get appropriate consideration.