Integration of ECQFD and LCA For Sustainable Product Design 2010 Journal of Cleaner Production
Integration of ECQFD and LCA For Sustainable Product Design 2010 Journal of Cleaner Production
Integration of ECQFD and LCA For Sustainable Product Design 2010 Journal of Cleaner Production
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 27 October 2009
Received in revised form
23 December 2009
Accepted 31 December 2009
Available online 14 January 2010
The purpose of this paper is to report a research carried out for ensuring sustainable product design by
the integration of environmentally conscious quality function deployment (ECQFD) and life cycle
assessment (LCA) approaches. Sustainability refers to the capability of an organization to maximize
resource efciency for ensuring clean and green atmosphere. The sustainable product development
model integrated with ECQFD and LCA has been used for ensuring sustainable product design. The
implementation study was carried out by gathering data from a single manufacturing organization. The
implementation experiences indicated that methodology of sustainable product design is practically
feasible and compatible. The ndings and contributions of this research would be useful to the majority
of the organizations situated in the world.
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Sustainable manufacturing
Quality function deployment
Environmentally conscious quality function
deployment
Life cycle assessment
Sustainable product
Costing
1. Introduction
Sustainability is recognized as an important concept by modern
organizations for survival in the competitive world (Bevilacqua
et al., 2007). Those organizations are forced to adopt practices that
are designed to maintain environment safety and minimize energy
utilization. Sustainable organizations reduce production cost and
prevent environmental problems for maintaining clean and green
atmosphere (Senthilkumaran et al., 2001). Green system integrates
product and process design issues with production planning and
control to identify, quantify, assess and manage the ow of environmental waste with the ultimate goal of reducing environmental
impact (Azzone and Noci, 1996). Green system tries to maximize
resource efciency for the production of sustainable components.
Sustainability is the critical intersection between factors like
manufacturing and product design practices and the environmental issues and concerns (Rusinko, 2007). Prevention of environmental problems tries to reduce the total life cycle cost of the
products and thereby ensuring sustainability (Kaebernick et al.,
2002). For the past one decade, the need for introducing environmental requirements into design and development of products is
becoming a vital issue. The question of applying how to infuse
834
Derivation of inferences
Fig. 1. Research methodology.
Table 1
ECQFD phase I for rotary switches.
Voice of customers
5
5
5
3
3
5
3
2
3
3
3
49
0.177
40
0.144
5
4
4
3
66
0.239
3
4
5
3
4
81
0.293
2
3
3
40
0.144
835
Table 2
ECQFD phase II for rotary switches.
Engineering Metrics
0.177
0.144
0.239
0.293
0.144
Component characteristics
Knob/Handle
Knob shaft
Front assembly
2
0.72
0.148
5
1.44
0.297
Mounting plate
Contact stages
Cover plate
5
5
5
2.325
0.480
0.354
0.073
purposes can be enhanced and facilitated by the use of this indicator. Daniel and Hesamedin (2009) have developed a concept
called Life Cycle Phases (LCP) families, to develop reference ranges
for environmental impact of new products as benchmarking with
previous environmental information and proved that LCA is useful
in comparing the environmental impact of alternatives, LCP or parts
in a product. The proposed concept develops a new product which
can be catalogued as environmentally better or worse than
a percentage of its competitors, depending on what position it
occupies in its LCP-family. Krozer and Vis (1998) has proposed an
LCA as quantitative tool for assessment of environmental impacts of
products and services. They presented a framework of the methodology, functional unit denition, inventory, impact assessment
and evaluation which can all be considerably improved. Conteras
et al. have used LCA to compare the environmental impacts of four
alternatives for exploitation of byproducts from cane sugar
production. They have compared the following four alternatives:
i) conventional sugar production process with three other alternatives; ii) waste water, lter cake and ashes for substitution of
synthetic fertilizers used for cane sugar production; iii) use of lter
cake and waste water for biogas production and iv) an integrated
alcohol and biogas production unit adjoining the sugarcane
production unit.
Ijomah (2007) have presented a process of bringing used
products to a like-new functional state with warranty to match is
being regarded as a vital strategy in waste management and environmentally conscious management. They presented an outline of
the elements of the re-manufacturing concept to improve the
robustness of design-for-re-manufacturing (DFRem). Rusinko
(2007) has presented an evaluation of environmentally sustainable
manufacturing practice and their impact on competitive outcomes.
They have presented an exploratory study of the relationship
between specic environmentally sustainable manufacturing
practices and specic competitive outcomes in a US based
commercial carpet industry. Sita and Subramania (2007) have
presented the derivation of manufacturing enterprise to internalize
environmental aspects of their business to meet local environmental regulations and to conform to emerging international
standards and best practices. They presented the concept of using
the limits between business functions of a manufacturing enterprise and the environmental dimensions of the businesses of
a simplied service oriented software model to deliver information
on the life cycle environmental impacts of manufacturing products.
Table 3
ECQFD phase III of rotary switches for option I.
Engineering metrics
0.177
0.144
0.239
0.293
0.144
0
5
0
0
5
0.000
0.333
0.000
0.000
0.500
836
Table 4
ECQFD phase III of rotary switches for option II.
Engineering metrics
0.177
0.144
0.239
0.293
0.144
2
5
0
0
0
Gehin et al. (2008) have presented a strategy called End of Life (EoL)
to assess product EoL process, which would be protable for an
enterprise given the business model in place. They integrated
constraints from EoL strategies into the early phases of design as an
important aspect that needs to be improved by combining this idea
with principles from concurrent engineering to develop design aids
which permits designers to compare their products to Remanufacturable Product Proles. Chen and Wang (2008) have presented
CIMSMINER that combines the data mining with CIMS (Computer
Integrated Manufacturing Systems) and instructs its objectives,
model, physical architecture and methods. Considering the characteristics of re-manufacturing of automotive products, the CIMSMINER has been used to derive the information concourse together
and obtain the data mining results to enable the improvement of
products. ECQFD and LCA integration enables the inducement of
environmental criteria into traditional product design process as
well as the cost model integrating production and environmental
costs and the technical feasibility of determining the status of an
old product for re-use.
The research gap observed based on the literature review is that
the practical feasibility of integrating ECQFD and LCA for enabling
sustainable product design has been attempted by few researchers.
In this context, this research project has been carried out.
0.285
0.333
0.000
0.000
0.000
3. Methodology
The methodology followed during this project is shown in Fig. 1.
As shown in Fig. 1, the project starts with the review on ECQFD
and LCA. This is followed by the identication of tools/techniques
for sustainable product development. A suitable organization for
conducting case study has been identied. This is followed by the
application of tools/techniques for ensuring sustainable product
development. Then the practical inferences are derived.
Table 5
ECQFD phase IV of rotary switches for option I.
Voice of customer
5
5
5
3
3
5
3
2
3
3
3
0.000
0.333
5
4
4
3
0.00
3
4
5
3
4
0.00
2
3
3
0.0196
0.0384
0.0332
0.0000
0.0000
0.098
0.192
0.166
0.000
0.000
0.0912
0.456
0.50
837
Table 6
ECQFD phase IV of rotary switches for option II.
Voice of customer
Customer
weights
Improvement
Improvement
rate of customer effect of customer
requirement
requirement
5
5
5
3
3
5
3
0.0246
0.0285
0.0133
0.0285
0.0000
0.123
0.142
0.066
0.085
0.000
0.0949
0.416
2
3
3
4
4
3
0.000
3
0.285
0.333
In-house
Production
Knob/Handle
Process
Knob shaft
Raw
material
Front assembly
Labor
Mounting plate
Factory
overhead
Contact stages
Purchasing
Supplier I
Supplier II
Supplier III
Clamping bolt
0.000
Assembly
process
Total price of
parts
Labor
Overhead
Production
Cost of
ROTARY
SWITCH
Operational cost
Latching spring
Terminal screw
2
3
3
Cover plate
Contact spring
3
4
5
3
4
0.000
Admin. Cost
Mark & Dist
Cost
Nut
Fig. 2. Production ow line for a new component of rotary switches.
Profit
Market
Price of
ROTARY
SWITCH
838
In-house
procurement
In-house
Remanufacturing
Process
Assembly Process
Knob shaft
Disassembly
Cleaning
Product cost of
Remanufactured
Components
Front Assembly
Labor
Collection
Mounting Plate
Transportation
&
Testing &
Inspection
Overhead
Contact stages
Total Price of
Reprocessing
Cover Plate
Contact spring
Purchasing
Latching spring
Supplier I
Operational Cost
Admin. Cost
Terminal screw
Supplier II
Clamping bolt
Supplier III
Nut
Product Cost of
Remanufactured
ROTARY
SWITCH
Profit
Market Price of
Remanufactured
ROTARY
SWITCH
Fig. 3. Production ow line for re-manufacturing old component of rotary switches.
Materials
Market price
(INR)
Required re-manufacturing
processes
Knob/Handle
Knob shaft
Front assembly
Mounting plate
Contact stages
Cover plate
Contact spring
Latching spring
Terminal screw
Clamping bolt
Nut
ABS
Steel
ABS
Nylon-GF
Nylon-GF
Nylon-GF
10.00
5.00
18.00
8.00
6.00
5.00
0.45
0.45
0.25
0.40
0.25
Inj. moulding
Machining
Inj. moulding
Inj. moulding
Inj. moulding
Inj. moulding
839
Table 8
Assessment model for individual component.
Description
Knob/Handle
Knob
shaft
Front
assembly
Mounting
plate
Contact
stages
Cover
plate
Contact
spring
Latching
spring
Terminal
screw
Clamping
bolt
Nut
8
0.8
8.8
10
1
4
0.4
4.4
5
0
15
0.15
15.15
18
1
6
0.6
6.6
8
1
5
0.5
5.5
6
1
4
0.4
4.4
5
1
0.3
0.03
0.303
0.45
1
0.3
0.03
0.303
0.45
1
0.15
0.015
0.165
0.25
1
0.25
0.025
0.275
0.40
1
0.15
0.015
0.165
0.25
1
10
1.2
0
4.4
18
2.85
8
1.4
6
0.5
5
0.6
0.45
0.147
0.45
0.147
0.25
0.085
0.40
0.125
0.25
0.085
4.5
6.75
0.0675
11.317
18
1
1.8
2.7
0.027
4.527
8
1
1.5
2.25
0.0225
3.77
6
1
1.2
1.8
0.018
3.018
5
1
0.09
0.135
0.0013
0.2263
0.45
1
0.09
0.135
0.0013
0.2263
0.45
1
0.045
0.0675
0.0006
0.1131
0.25
1
0.075
0.1125
0.0011
0.1886
0.40
1
0.045
0.0675
0.0006
0.1131
0.25
1
18
6.683
3.833
8
3.473
2.073
6
2.23
1.73
5
1.982
1.382
0.45
0.2237
0.0767
0.45
0.2237
0.0767
0.25
0.1369
0.519
0.40
0.2114
0.0864
0.25
0.136
0.05
2.4
3.6
0.036
6.036
10
1
1.2
1.8
0.018
3.018
5
0
10
3.964
2.764
0
3.01
1.382
combinations of components and EMs. Options I and II are concerned with the design of a rotary switch taking environmental
aspects into account that is obtained from the phase II of ECQFD for
further improvement of design changes in an electronic rotary
switch.
Option I:
The materials used in the contact stages should have high
insulation strength and making knob shaft from material
with high friction co-efcient to increase the physical
lifetime.
Option II:
The material of the contact stages should have a longer
physical lifetime and the number of parts used in front
assembly should be minimum.
The numbers indicating the relational strength in phase II of
Table 2 at mapping points between the target EM and parts
remaining as shown in Tables 3 and 4. The improvement rate at each
EM item mrj is obtained from the equation Masui et al. (2003):
PK
mrj
bj;k cj;k
PK
k1 bj;k
k1
j 1; 2; /; J
PJ
yri
mrj ai;j
j2
PJ
a
j2 i;j
i 1; 2; .; I
840
1.
To what extent do you believe that the Environmental Conscious Quality Function Deployment (ECQFD) would enable the
attainment of sustainability in your organization?
Partially Possible
10
Completely possible
To what extent do you believe that the simplified Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is practically feasible and would
enable sustainability in your organization?
Partially Possible
10
Completely possible
To what extent do you believe that the suggested product development cycle would enable sustainability in the process of designing
product process and services?
3
6
Figure
6. 4Format of 5questionnaire
Partially Possible
10
Completely possible
phases III and IV. In this case study, the scores 0.456 and 0.416 are
obtained for options I and II, respectively and it has been concluded
that option I is found to be the best.
5.3. Life cycle assessment (LCA)
Life cycle assessment is used for assessing the environmental
impact of products and processes. Since the detailed assessment of
LCA is time consuming, simplied LCA methodology proposed by
Kaebernick et al. (2003) has been used in this project.
5.3.1. Production ow
To produce a new rotary switch, the organization manufactures
knob/handle, knob shaft, front assembly, mounting plate, contact
stages and front assembly in-house, while the other components
such as contact spring, latching spring, terminal screw, clamping
bolt and nut are purchased from suppliers. The parts are then
assembled to produce a switch as shown in Fig. 2. Producing a new
PG PVL PLCC:
The technical status of a product is expressed by the term
known as product effectiveness (PE). This is set to 100% for a new
product and then decreased over time for a used part. The proposed
Table 9
Consolidated responses of the executives.
Serial
number
Question
Average response of the executives in a Likerts scale of 110. (1 not all possible, 5 partially possible,
10 completely possible)
E1
E2
E3
E4
E5
Average response
Range
Table 11
Results of t-test.
Identity of the
executives
Response
E1
E2
E3
E4
E5
841
model has been applied for assessing the re-usability of each part
and the switch as a whole. The calculations and the results for part
assessment are shown in Table 8. The following assumptions were
made for the calculations. Based on the sensitivity analysis, the
environmental cost is set as 10% of product cost and 1% of remanufacturing cost were found to be realistic. Therefore, these
gures are used to calculate the environmental cost for the new and
old product, respectively. PE indicates whether a part has re-use
potential or not. The rotary switch components and their EOL
options are listed in Table 7.
The comparison results for all parts of PG and PLCC are shown in
Figs. 4 and 5. Fig. 4 shows that all components have the positive
values of DPG, which means they are feasible for re-use. If any
components contain the negative DPG, which indicates those
components are not feasible for re-manufacturing.
6. Results and discussions
In order to explore the feasibility of deploying the process of
sustainable product development, a feedback session has been
conducted at ABC. Five executives participated in the feedback
session. The format of the questionnaire is shown in Fig. 6.
The consolidated responses of the executives are shown in
Table 9.
An interpretation on the responses of the executives indicated
that the feasibility of deploying integrated ECQFD and LCA for
enabling sustainable product development is to an extent of 80%.
E1
E2
E3
E4
E5
3
3
3
3
3
7.667
8.667
8.000
8.333
7.667
0.577
0.577
1.000
0.577
0.577
0.333
0.333
0.577
0.333
0.333
(6.232,
(7.232,
(5.516,
(6.899,
(6.232,
9.101)
10.101)
10.484)
9.768)
9.101)
4.00
1.00
1.73
2.00
4.00
0.057#
0.423#
0.225#
0.184#
0.057#
P values are greater than 0.05, which indicates the acceptance of null hypothesis.
Managements approval is
not obtained to apply
ECQFD and LCA
integration in the
organization
842