KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND ECO-DESIGN SCOPES

Rinaldo C. Michelini and Roberto P. Razzoli

PMAR Lab., DIMEC, University of Genova, via Opera Pia 15/a, 16145 - Genova, Italy

Keywords: Knowledge management, Lifestyle design, Product-service, Reverse logistics, Service engineering.

Abstract: The eco-protection acts imply reorganising the manufacture business, towards product-service supply

chains. The innovation can be tackled at two ranges: - the presetting of the knowledge management

surroundings, to deal with the extended producers’ responsibility; - the incorporation of the entrepreneurial

facility/function assembly, to accomplish the product-service delivery. The paper surveys the knowledge

management frame, specifying the standard PLM aids, with account of the PLM-SE and PLM-RL

requirements, giving especial attention on the alternative net-concern options, from virtual, to extended

enterprises infra-structures.

1 INTRODUCTION

The industrialised societies face greater challenges

than ever, to keep the growth pace, due to

globalisation (competition of lower wage countries,

etc.) and to sustainable growth (exacting regulations

to preserve eco-conservativeness, etc.). For higher

effectiveness, several major changes in product

design are needed, with focus on lifelong properties

and on recovery opportunities. These paradigm

shifts modify the relative weigh of the design phase,

compared to the production phase, as, in the past,

return on investment was mostly won by

manufacture internalities, once pre-set optimal off-

process choices.

The trend leads to expand manufacturers’

liability, from the point-of-sale, to the point-of-

service, to support the conformance assessment

duties, as for safety and environment protection acts,

and to the point-of-disposal, to comply the enacted

recovery, recycling and reclamation duties. This

means to deal with the provision of products-

services, where the additions correspond to the

intangible frames, going together with the (material)

supply chains, to warranty scopes feat, at clients’

satisfaction and environmental safeguard.

The design steps become critical: to optimise the

lifecycle performance, to increase the profitability,

to enhance the delivery quality, to respond to the

regulatory drivers, to satisfy customers and third

parties, up to embed the producers’ responsibility on

the all supply chain. This requires reconsidering the

design duties, by exploiting proper decision skills

that cut across the manufacture business, to

concentrate the efforts on the additions appearing

after the point-of-sale, and to integrate prospects on

the items’ life, taking in on-duty service and reverse

logistic views, with full business coherence.

2 ECO-DRIVING KNOWLEDGE

The knowledge management is fine way to improve

the enterprise value chain awareness, achieving the

unified accountability of the on-duty and end-of-life

marks. The provision, manufacture, operation,

maintenance, disposal and recovery steps are tested

and assessed by virtual prototypes. As compared to

early trade habits, when competition is won by off-

process presetting the optimal production plans,

today, the decision support is required to run on-

process, aiming at:

■ features-customised products, with warranted

lifelong performance and acknowledged call-back;

■ total-quality manufacturing efficiency and

robustness, with minimal environment impact;

■ standard servicing for conformance-to-use,

provided by voluntary agreement integration;

■ recovery duties, as soon as prescribed by the

enacted eco-consistency regulations.

The conventional manufacturing business

requires the full rethinking of the engineering

paradigms, forcedly obliged to look at the on-duty

performance and at the end-of-life requirements, as

main features guaranteeing competitiveness, based

on the service externalities, as compared with the

old process internalities. The need to look at the all

supply chain follows the established trends of the

151

C. Michelini R. and P. Razzoli R. (2009).

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND ECO-DESIGN SCOPES.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Software Agents and Internet Computing, pages 151-154

DOI: 10.5220/0001850601510154

 SciTePress

economy of scope. The vertical flow-shops are

replaced by adaptive job-shops, incorporating non

proprietary facilities and technologies, with resort to

out-sourcing and productive break-up. The firms’

functions (strategic positioning, market assessment,

risk management, resource planning, quality

deployment, engineering trimming, work-flow

scheduling, factory management, shop running,

throughput monitoring, performance evaluation,

finance/cost managing, etc.) become interlaced, with

commitment and liability distributed among the

associated partners. The suited set-up is forcedly

achieved dynamically, through co-operative efforts,

and after facility updating.

The business competitiveness turns from the

capability of offering products (fit-for-purpose to the

individual necessities), to the ability of providing

added services, granting functions to the buyers’

satisfaction and better tangibles efficiency (fit-for-

purpose to general guard). The emerging knowledge

management aids, now, are:

■ the presetting of product lifecycle management,

PLM, tools, offered as standard design out-fit;

■ the provision of service engineering, SE, aids, as

diagnosis, decision and maintenance support;

■ the execution of reverse logistics, RL, duties,

when requested at the items’ end-of-life.

The business lifelong widening is sought with

resort to enhanced PLM tools, having federated

architecture, assuring unified access to the value

chain issues. The integration of the lifecycle view

(structure layout, making process, quality guarantee,

up-keeping policy, disposal duties, etc.) into a super-

model is competitive advantage, to upgrade the

manufacture activity. These PLM tools are

attractive, to fix the divide, favouring value added

deliveries of high technology countries.

The paper directly deals with the eco-design

knowledge management tools, in view to develop

right lifestyle information surroundings. Indirectly,

the underling entrepreneurial settings are appraised,

based on assembly the needed facilities/functions,

timely adapted to the current product-service

provision. The net-concern help is the winning

knowledge management support, distinguishing

dissimilar infra-organisational options, from the

virtual enterprise lay-out, where independent

partners collaborate to the common project, to the

extended enterprise set-up, where the leader

manufacturer establishes and co-ordinates the actual

supply contract. The co-operating structures are

motivated by the extended producers’ responsibility.

The former situation is apt answer, when the eco-

regulations are ruled on voluntary base. When

compulsory eco-targets are required, the latter

allows reaching better performance, when the

design-for-service or the design-for-recovery is

standard manufacturer’s option, ruled by the

resource manager, as current internal duty. In

general, however, the two virtual either extended

organisations, today, depend on how the single

enterprise is aware of the changes, and is capable to

incorporate the externalities, as necessary

completion of the traditional internalities.

3 ENGINEERING FUNCTIONS

The market of manufactured goods aims at

knowledge-intensive deliveries, with large intangible

value added. Companies’ fight begins at the

ideation/development stage, to conceive buyers’

tailored offers with comparatively effective

performance, reached along the lifelong operation

and call-back stages. The business profitability

requires lifestyle knowledge orientation:

■ off-process decision support instruments, assuring

the design and development of the deliveries;

■ on-process monitoring and managing aids, assuring

the lifecycle and recovery prescribed charges.

Organisations, based on co-operative networked

infrastructures, are the chief instrumental aids to rule

and manage the business to manufacture and to trade

products-services, at on-duty and end-of-life

coverage. Suitable modelling and simulation tools

need to be available, backing the on-process

information flow, to provide the assessment means

for the operation testing, accomplished on virtual

prototypes. Addressing the product conception and

acknowledgement tools as off-process decision

support, we distinguish four domains, Fig. 1, in

progress tackled by the integration steps.

The eco-driven innovation requires lifestyle

knowledge orientation, grounded on design supports

allowing the supply chain transparency, through

considerably up-dated business paradigms. The

engineering paradigms do not establish as self-

• product specification, leading to proper performance,

selecting, by CAD, CAM, etc. tools, the producibility figures,

operation constraints, disposal requirements, etc., of the

forecast product-service delivery;

• process specification, leading to improve the manufacturing

effectiveness by the simultaneous engineering practice of the

product-and-process mutual betterment, through pace-wise

up-grading;

• eco-consistency specification, leading to establish regulation,

maintenance, restoring, etc. plans, for on-duty conformance-

to-use, and to call-back and recovery plans in keeping with

the enacted rules;

• enterprise specification, leading to adapt the productive

infrastructure, which support the supply chain with resort to

the facility/function integration, matching the in-progress

requested externalities.

Figure 1: Knowledge manager: basic integration steps.

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reference proposals, rather they develop to face

current demands. The EU eco-policy, to foster more

eco-conservative behaviours, is enacting Directives,

requiring conformance-for-use assessment at the

point-of-service, and mandatory recovery targets at

the end-of-life. These acts, moreover, joined to

producers’ responsibility for the free take-back of

mass-produced durables (such as household

appliances and cars), lead to restructuring the

industrial businesses, as competition is ruled by the

externalities, depending on the supply chain

lifecycle performance, rather than on production

technology conventional internalities. The

modelling is still hampered by severe limits, such as:

■ creation of tools requires sophisticated skill and

domain practice, mainly aiming at specific purposes;

■ technical aids are dealt with as problem-solving

skill (with negligible cost/benefit economic

concern);

■ the issues are not openly shared, rather protected as

proprietary assets (out of limited side-views);

■ the modelling addresses one domain, and

knowledge transfer requests engineer’s

intermediation;

■ complex products requires multiple models, mostly

not combining together to yield integrated views;

■ the capture and reuse of a product knowledge and

data require high ingenuity and oriented training;

thus, in general, little capability exists to exploit the

product models to investigate the lifecycle

interactions, unless for single constraints, separately

acknowledged through special purpose descriptions.

3.1 The Lifestyle Design Knowledge

The lifestyle design is critical because of the lack of

univocal technical leading strings, due to the

relevance of the externalities, having socio-political

spurs. This distinguishes the concept, by respect to

the traditional process- or product-innovation, when

higher efficiency is achieved by scope economy

grounded on technical expertise. The engineering

paradigms, leading to eco-design issues, are

motivated by the externalities, i.e., demands fixed by

the environmental acts, and managed by the original

manufacturers, after up-grading their business

organisation, to incorporate every facility and

function, required by the in-progress supply chain.

The driving motivation, out of the process- or

product-innovation, happens to be fostered by

enterprise- or environment-innovation, meaning that

new industrial settings are needed.

The engineering design functions are sketched in

the full paper. To give a bird-eye view on the tackled

ideas, we should distinguish the final issues, namely

the

2P2E product-process-environment-enterprise

mixing, from the instrumental aids, namely the

M&SF modelling and simulation features. The

details starts to become shared engineering practice

only at advanced entrepreneurial levels and

reference is deferred to the quoted references and the

there included technical bibliography. Especial

emphasis should be given to the environment and to

the enterprise integration steps, to transfer the

economy of scope requirements (cooperative

processing, piece-wise improving, lean engineering

and proactive up-keeping) into eco-achievements

through the suited inclusion of facilities/functions

provided by the entrepreneurial set-up choice.

3.2 The PLM, PLM-SE, PLM-RL Aids

The swap from the lifestyle design, to the supply

chain management is necessary challenge,

requesting series of critical accomplishments,

originally sketched in the full paper, for which we

again defer to the references. They, mainly, move

from a set of information tools:

■ PLM, product lifecycle management;

■ PLM-SE, service engineering oriented PLM;

■ PLM-RL, reverse logistic oriented PLM;

and contain the network enablers, to build the

business partnership effectiveness.

To achieve the concern federation ability,

research has to be undertaken in the model build-up,

interfacing techniques and programming schemes.

The challenge is clear, listing the crucial goals and

requirements, Fig. 2, each time tackled by the

knowledge management tools.

The

2P2E design means moving two steps further

the simultaneous engineering product-process

coverage, to include the supply chain specification,

as prerequisite for the business competition. The steps

mean to include the value chain externalities, to deal

with on-duty behaviour and end-of-life recovery, thus,

• flexible complex product representation: to build standards

and procedures that enable creating a reference model to

yield complete descriptions by simple modules addition and

interoperability methods;

• robust performance simulation environment: to fashion

procedures translating customers needs and wants, and

tracking the cost sensitivity along the value chains, by means

of plug-and-play blocks;

• flexible complex process representation: to specify the

production capacity/capability layout, including options, such

as productive break-up and out-sourcing;

• conformance assessment simulation environment: to verify

the on-process functional requirements, impact prescriptions,

amount of material reclamation, etc.;

• flexible complex lifecycle representation: to describe the

supplier responsibility and the service sold with the product

(reprocessing and recycling included);

• eco-consistency assessment environment: to define the third-

party certification bodies and the reference metrics, related

with the supply chain eco-impact;

• distributed supply chain collaboration environment: to provide

the features of the networked organisation, linking suppliers,

consumers and controllers.

Figure 2: Knowledge manager: goals and requirements.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND ECO-DESIGN SCOPES

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to face demands out of the traditional manufacturers

core competences. At the design phase, the innovation

shows that the existing integration aids, such as

product lifecycle management, PLM, need to evolve,

to link the operation account and to cover the lifelong

on-duty picture.

In the value chain knowledge management, the

real-time, on-process duties play relevant role,

provided by the specialised operators/facilities,

timely involved for the running and disposal duties.

The technical details of the product-service,

nonetheless, need to be already established at the

design stage. In different words, the lifestyle

delivering distinguishes from the earlier supply

chains, due to the information content, covering the

operation responsibility span up to the points-of-

service and of call-back.

The PLM technicality develops, accordingly.

The basic PLM, product lifecycle management, is

the tool to handle the product data, through the

lifecycle, from materials provision, to on-duty

requirements and end-of-life disposal. It includes

functions such as the organization of engineering

and processing data, of operation maintenance and

conformance assessment, and of take-back recovery,

recycling and reclamation tasks. Its completion

requires embedding:

■ the reverse logistics, RL, the business opportunity

(possibly subject to compulsory rules), for the

recovery (reuse, recycle) of end-of-life items, in

compliance of the enacted bylaws, with the related

data monitoring and vaulting accomplishments;

■ the service engineering, SE, the business

opportunity (mainly driven by voluntary

agreements), along the product life-span, to

guarantee the item enjoyment, with conformance-to-

use certification, and related data monitoring and

vaulting accomplishments.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The eco-protection acts are challenge to reorganise

the manufacture market by knowledge

entrepreneurship schemes. The new market leaders

will move within this technical-scientific

framework, replacing the economy of scale, by the

economy of scope, with two options:

■ functions delivery and artefacts life-extension

policy, with the profitability in the business of

supplying products-services, incorporating the

externalities of the lifestyle provisioning;

■ increased recycling efficiency, with profitability in

the new businesses aiming at reverse logistics (from

waste, to secondary ‘raw’ materials), according to

the already enacted targets.

The two domains develop outside the factories,

and the knowledge contents of the required PLM

aids shall, accordingly, expand to deal with the set of

scopes, with critical weigh, aiming at on-duty

performance or on-duty reliability, and at pollution

precepts or recovery effectiveness. Moreover, the

PLM prerequisites (e.g., model total connectedness)

are critical challenge, when dealing with net-

concern, built by independent partners that focus on

their core competencies and join, each other, the

efforts for co-design, co-manufacture, co-marketing,

co-maintain, co-servicing and co-recycle, in view to

fulfil the requirement of supplying products-services

at the clients’ benefit and the environment safety.

The full paper outlines the expected evolution in

the manufacture business, focusing on two example

cases, one considering SMSs’ clusters working in

the service engineering business by voluntary

agreements schemes; one covering the reverse

logistics mandatory duties by authority ruled net

concerns.

The

2P2E integration through suited M&SF tools is

the necessary innovation, still very little understood

by old-fashioned enterprises. The example

developments given by the full paper are especially

relevant, when, e.g., the reverse logistics of end-of-

life vehicles ELV or of waste electrical-electronic

equipment WEEE are presented, while dealing with

already enacted EU bylaws. The few remarks

sketched by the present overview can only say that

the problems exist and that the solutions are as well

available for the people properly involved in

effective innovation.

REFERENCES

Acaccia, G., Kopàcsi, S., Kovàcs, G., Michelini, R.C.,

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Knowledge and Technology Management in Virtual

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Anufriev, A., Kopàcsi S., Kovàcs, G., Michelini, R.C.,

2007. Ambient intelligence as enabling technology for

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Michelini, R.C., 2008. Knowledge entrepreneurship and

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pp. 350.

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