Coordination of Product Life Cycle with Product Usage Mode

For achieving better environmental performance of products or product systems, it is essential to manage total product life cycle. This paper describes a method for supporting product life cycle management by comprehensive product life cycle simulation, which is a basis for designing and evaluating total product life cycle. For life cycle evaluation, it is important to seek for the better product services, at the same time to seek for lower environmental burden and life cycle management costing. For this purpose, a product usage model is proposed, where customer satisfaction is measured by offered product functionality. The same level of customer satisfaction can be achieved by various different life cycle management options. By taking examples of technologically immature short-life products, like mobile phones, effect of difference of required product service quality is investigated, and appropriate product management strategy is discussed for improving product service quality.