The effects of Product Development, Product Promotion & Product Innovation initiatives on the product life-cycles

The paper is aimed at elucidating the measures that the marketers take to Develop & Promote products and do product differentiation through product innovations to manage favourably the product life cycles - fighting competition both for sustenance in the market and/or to enlarge market shares. They choose to create better and consistent customer awareness with emotional appeal on the one hand and add value to the products bringing in new or altered product features when needed to deliver enhanced benefits that the buyers in the market look for. That is, in order to give the products / brands prolonged life cycle, the marketers develop their products, do promotions and also product innovations (to add value to products for better performance, look & feel of them), in a bid to differentiate them from those other similar competing products/brands. Product life cycles are the captured performance graphs for the products, which could be considered as prescriptions for corrections of products and brands in their tangible and intangible features so as to make them spring back to perform to the levels. The paper thus focuses on the practices that the marketers undertake to do in order to win the hearts of the buyers. The larger objective of the paper is to throw light on all the initiatives of the marketers which they would do to match the customer preferences

Werkerassistenz in der manuellen Montage/Analysis of the Impact of Informational Assistance Systems on Manual Assembly – Operator Assistance in Manual Assembly

Kürzere Innovations- und Produktlebenszyklen bringen eine höhere Variantenvielfalt in die Produktion. Infolge dessen ändern sich die Anforderungen an die Gestaltung der manuellen Montage. Werker müssen in kürzester Zeit befähigt werden, ein schnell wechselndes Produktportfolio fehlerfrei zu montieren. Zunehmend werden dafür diverse unterstützende Werkerassistenzsysteme eingesetzt. Dieser Beitrag veranschaulicht die Potenziale informatorischer Werkerassistenzsysteme.   Shorter innovation and product life cycles increase the variety in production. In consequence, the requirements for the design of manual assembly are changing. Workers have to be enabled to assemble a rapidly changing product portfolio without errors in the shortest possible time. Various assistance systems are increasingly used to support the operator. This article presents the potential of informational assistance systems.

Integrating Enablers of Sustainable Freight Transportation and Perishable Commodity Supply Chain

Extant research has addressed the challenges pertaining to sustainable freight transportation and those associated with transportation of perishable commodities in disparate ways in that enablers of sustainable freight transportation have not been mapped with the considerations of transportation related to perishable commodities. This is characterized by short product life-cycles, retail demand uncertainties, traceability issues and so forth. In this backdrop, the authors' research attempts to integrate the considerations related to sustainable freight transportation with that of perishability-related aspects. To this end, this research employs interpretive structural modelling (ISM) so that enablers related to both the problems can be fused and modeled in such a way that enablers related to independent, autonomous, dependent, and linkage attributes can be identified, and their interactions can be understood.

Auslaufintegrierte Anlaufproduktion*/Phase-out integrated ramp-up production. Challenges of planning manufacturing systems in the phase-out integrated ramp-up production

Aufgrund von sich ständig verkürzenden Produktlebenszyklen sind produzierende Unternehmen dazu gezwungen, in immer kürzeren Zeiträumen Produktan- und -ausläufe durchzuführen. Die integrierte Herstellung von An- sowie Auslaufprodukt im gemeinsamen Fertigungssystem bietet Potenzial zur gesamtwirtschaftlichen Optimierung der Fertigung. Hieraus resultieren neue Herausforderungen beim Gestalten dieser Fertigungssysteme, die im Folgenden vorgestellt werden.   Due to ever shorter product life cycles, manufacturing companies are forced to carry out product ramp-ups and phase-outs in ever shorter periods of time. The integrated production of ramp-up and phase-out products in a common manufacturing system offers potential for the optimization of the global economy of production. This results in new challenges for planning these manufacturing systems which are presented in the following.

Special Issue on Design and Manufacturing for Environmental Sustainability

This is the fourth special issue on design and manufacturing for environmental sustainability. While Japanese manufacturers are not so active in this field, the trend of integrating sustainability into manufacturing activities and management of companies is becoming dominant. We can point out three epoch-making instances: namely, United Nations’ ‘Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),’ which consists of 17 goals to be achieved by 2030, covering not only environmental sustainability but also social and human sustainability; EU’s ‘Circular Economy,’ which promotes various routes for resource circulation (e.g., reuse, remanufacturing, maintenance, and recycling) for increasing employment and market competitiveness of EU and resource efficiency; and ‘Paris Agreement’ on climate change, which enforces reduction of the emission of greenhouse gases to zero by the end of this century. This special issue includes six well-written papers, all of which are deeply related to these three policies. The first four papers focus on product life cycle or even multiple product life cycles. This aspect is an inherent feature of design and manufacturing for environmental sustainability, which was not considered in traditional design and manufacturing. The keywords of these four papers are life cycle CO2 emission evaluation of electric vehicles, life cycle simulation of reuse among multiple product life cycles, disassembly part selection based on the idea of life expectancy, and personalization design aiming at avoiding mass production and mass disposal. The latter two papers are rather fresh in this journal. The fifth paper deals with customer preferences in Indonesia. Focusing on life styles in developing countries is a very important topic emphasized in SDGs. The last paper deals with food waste, which is emphasized in both SDGs and Circular Economy. Most of the papers, revised and extended in response to the editor’s invitations, were originally presented at EcoDesign 2017: the tenth International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, held in Tainan, Taiwan. The editor sincerely thanks the authors and reviewers for their devoted work in making this special issue possible. We hope that these articles will encourage further research on design and manufacturing for environmental sustainability.