Proactive environmental strategies and performance: role of green supply chain processes and green product design in the Chinese high-tech industry

Though many firms still believe that passive environmental strategies are sufficient, it is pertinent that they move beyond this belief and take a proactive supply chain-wide environmental stance so as to create a sustainable environment. In this paper, we seek to extend current work within green supply chain management by considering multiple green supply chain capabilities and performance measures. We hypothesise the linkage between environmental orientation, green supply chain capabilities and performance by drawing upon stakeholder theory and natural resource-based view. More importantly, our study is the first to distinguish between product and process-related capabilities in the green supply chain area and study their direct and mediating role with respect to environmental and financial performance measures. Using survey data collected from 256 Chinese-based high-tech firms, we analyse several hypothesised relationships. Our results provide strong support for the significant role that green product design and green supply chain processes can play in improving firms’ environmental and financial performance. Interestingly, our results also suggest that green product design may not have a direct impact on financial performance.     

产品运输包装可靠性设计

要在运输过程中保护产品免受破坏,就需对产品进行缓冲包装设计,传统的包装设计方法具有明显的局限性.文中基于包装动力可靠性理论提出了一种新的运输包装设计方法,对运输包装可靠性设计的基本思想、设计流程、目标可靠性确定及可靠性校核等问题作了探讨,并从设计思想、流程等角度对新设计方法与传统设计方法进行比较,得出新设计方法设计出的缓冲包装能更好地保护产品.     

现代产品设计中的适当设计理念

论证了在现代产品设计中提出适当设计理念的理由,阐述了适当设计的本质含义.并从消费需求、产品的功能、材料及造型等4个方面,对适当设计的具体运作方法进行了比较详细的分析和研究.同时也指出了,利用适当设计,可使产品能最准确地满足目标群体最真实、最合理的消费需求,以缓解当前因产品的过度设计所带来种种问题.     

Manufacturer's product choice in the presence of environment-conscious consumers: brown product or green product

Nowadays, the brown products are losing market coverage to their green alternatives due to consumers' increasing environmental awareness. Confronted with this threat, many traditional manufacturers currently producing only brown product are contemplating the launch of green product. Base on this background, this paper explores the optimal product choice for the manufacturer. We first derive the optimal results for each product choice. Then we analyse the optimal product choice for the manufacturer. Next, we study how to induce the production of green product. Finally, the fraudulent behaviour on product's environmental attributes is addressed. Main findings are as follows. First, manufacturer's optimal product choice is to produce green product if the investment-to-value ratio and the unit production cost for green product are low and to produce brown product if the investment-to-value ratio and the unit production cost for green product are high. Second, the two-part tariff contract is applicable to stimulate the manufacturer to produce green product under certain conditions. While exterior intervention is necessary under other conditions. Third, when the manufacturer and the retailer diverge in product preference, the manufacturer has a strong incentive to behave fraudulently, and this type of manufacturer needs strict supervision.     

Review of supply chain configuration and design decision-making for new product

The nature of competitive markets continuously pushes manufacturers to develop new products to meet the increasingly diversified customer demands. Manufacturers thus have to handle the complexities generated during the total life cycles of various product types, from product design to procurement, production, marketing and recycling. Though some management practices in mass customisation help to improve the performance of manufacturing systems, there are still some fundamental problems not covered. Joint decision-making of product and supply chain design, for example, is one of them. The existing industrial practice tends to treat these two problems separately. Decoupling these two problems decrease the design complexity but may lead to suboptimal decision outcome. To enhance understanding of the interconnected decisions for supply chain management and product design, this review collects related literature on this topic and focuses on the analysis of existing papers from an operation research perspective.     

Coordination of pricing,inventory, and production reliability decisions in deteriorating product supply chains

In this article, we study a two-level supply chain model for deteriorating items, in which the supplier’s production system is unreliable and the retailer’s demand is price-sensitive. The supplier’s production line may randomly shift from the in-control state to the out-of-control state. When the production line is in the out-of-control state, a proportion of the produced products will have bad quality. To mitigate the out-of-control risks, the supplier can improve the production line reliability by investing in high-quality machines, highly skilled workers, or advanced maintenance technologies. We start with the study of pricing and inventory problems concerning endogenous reliability in the integrated and decentralised scenario. To better illustrate the proposed models, two applicable algorithms are designed to determine the optimal production reliability, ordering quantity, and prices. Then, a cooperative reliability investment and revenue-sharing contract is proposed to coordinate the supply chain. Numerical examples and sensitivity analysis of the equilibrium strategies and coordinating results on key system parameters (e.g. deterioration rate, production rate, etc.) are given to verify the effectiveness of the contract, and meanwhile get some managerial insights.     

Integrated demand-responsive scheduling of maintenance and transportation operations in military supply chains

The management of a military supply chain (SC) involves the integration of production, packaging, warehousing, repair, maintenance and transportation of army supplies. In this paper, we focus on the integrated demand-responsive scheduling of maintenance and transportation operations within the SC. We consider a modular representation of a SC, in which the maintenance and transportation operations constitute the corresponding modules. An efficient integration of these operations is carried out by an additional controlling (commanding) module. We describe and analyse the optimisation problems arising in each module. The main contribution of the paper is that the analysis and optimisation of the controlling module permit to enhance the performance of the entire SC. Computational experiments prove the validity and effectiveness of the suggested models.     

A framework for designing robust supply chains considering product development issues

The primary objective of the design for supply chain (DFSC) is the selection of an appropriate product family. Moreover, it deals with the selection of the optimal combination among the different conflicting criteria while making a trade-off between the supply chain cost, sales profit and the product design complexities. In this research, to address the DFSC issues a product platform approach has been proposed which amalgamates the component modularity as well as the function modularity in the product design. The optimisation model proposed in this paper for the product development and the supply chain design is based on a generic bill of materials (GBOM) representation. The complete framework includes vital decision-making needed for designing a robust supply chain such as locating plants to alleviate the likely dominance of production cost and market mediation cost on product variety and imparting process flexibility of the located plants. The optimisation model proposed in this paper, models the supply chain cost, sales profit and product design complexity as three criteria that altogether determine the robustness of the supply chain and the underlying product development approach. Certain parameters like process flexibility, flow types and drivers of the product variety dominance have been controlled in the design framework. To resolve the complexity of the proposed model a genetic algorithm (GA) technique has been proposed. The proposed GA adopts an arithmetic crossover, a dynamic mutation and a variable penalty strategy to produce optimal results in a very short computational time. To validate the proposed model, a simulated case study of the wiring harness supplier of an AGV manufacturer has been studied.     

论产品造型设计中的最小信息单位

在产品造型设计中最小信息单位是指能够传递设计师创作思想和设计理念的最基本的语言构成,它没有具体的量化标准,属于动态可变的设计应用范畴.最小信息单位依据设计需要,通过分解与整合等手段形成众多新的基础要素,为产品造型设计的发展提供独特的视角与平台.     

Japanese-style management,product design and corporate strategy

After a brief economic and cultural overview, Japan's design strategy is viewed through the example of several major companies visited by the author on a recent trip to Japan. It examines the role of company structure and investment in design to help understand the close links between design, production engineering, research and marketing. Trends in design philosophy are viewed with reference to the emerging “Humanware” approach and the effects of CAD-FMS. The paper contrasts the British approach to design with that of major Japanese companies.     

An integrated closed-loop supply chain model with location allocation problem and product recycling decisions

Environmental pollutions caused by improper abandoned cartridges increase dramatically nowadays. In Hong Kong, due to abundant quantity of cartridges being used, producers have to optimise their forward and reverse networks to maximise the recycling rate and their profits. In this paper, a comprehensive closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) model is established. This model contains eight partners in CLSC and describes the existing cartridge recycling situation in Hong Kong. In the literatures, many CLSC models were established and studied, but few of them analysed the delivery activity for different kinds of materials extracted from the used products and also, few papers studied the situation that used products are classified into good and poor quality. In this model, delivery activities of different materials are considered and the used cartridges are classified into good-quality ones and poor-quality ones. Producers will have different methods to process them. This problem is formulated into an Integer programming model. Since both delivery routes and delivery quantities problems are known to be NP hard, a novel modified two-stage genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed. A new two-stage encoding algorithm in the proposed GA reinforces the genetic searching ability in tackling this kind of problem. As the model is new in literature, we used Integer Programming to solve the testing instances and benchmark with the proposed algorithm. The results show that a near-optimal solution can be obtained by the proposed GA in a much shorter computational time.     

Joint decision of product configuration and remanufacturing for product family design

Product family design (PFD) is a popular method for increasing product variety to satisfy the needs of diversified markets. With the increasing concern for environmental friendliness in society, more and more companies develop launching remanufactured products and include them in their product families. Therefore, PFD should be considered in a broad decision space where configuration of product variants and remanufacturing are considered simultaneously. However, this issue was not addressed properly in previous research. In this paper, a methodology for joint decision of product configuration and remanufacturing is proposed in which a bi-objective mixed integer programming model is formulated to determine the configurations of both new and remanufactured products for minimising product cost, maximising total market share, and satisfying reliability requirements. Then, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGAII) is adopted to solve the optimization problem. Computational experiments were conducted and their results show that NSGAII is convergent to the model well. A case study is presented to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.     

形式追随材料--材料在产品设计中的应用

提出了一种新颖的产品特征结构,该结构能清晰地表达了产品设计中产品的个性与材料、加工工艺以及易用性的关系,特别讨论了构成产品个性的3个层次的内容.然后以具体案例为例,阐述了如何针对产品个性的各个方面,恰当地运用材料及其加工工艺来创建产品的个性特征.     

Incentive compatible resource allocation in concurrent design

This article presents an approach that a manager can use to allocate resources needed to design a system among the members of a concurrent design team. The system being designed is assumed to be composed of a number of subsystems, each designed by a different engineer. These engineers possess private information about the performance of their subsystem as a function of the design resources that they are allocated. This article shows how the manager of such a concurrent design project can induce rational self-interested engineers to reveal truthfully their private subsystem performance functions. This is accomplished through an incentive contract that ties each engineer’s pay to the contribution of their subsystem to the performance of the overall system. The approach builds from a Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanism to achieve, as an ex-post Nash equilibrium, truthful reporting of private subsystem performance functions by risk-neutral agents.     

论绿色包装设计中人文精神的构建

包装设计在其商业价值之上,应当有其自身的艺术内涵,它应当根植于包装文化的自身.绿色包装设计文化的产生及发展,是建立在自身的意识和群体之间的整体关系上而产生的一种生态观念.对传统文化融汇及精神层面的绿色创造,探讨现代包装必须进行生态与人文方面的双重塑造.     

Incentives for quality improvement efforts coordination in supply chains with partial cost allocation contract

In this paper, we consider quality improvement efforts coordination in a two-stage decentralised supply chain with a partial cost allocation contract. The supply chain consists of one supplier and one manufacturer, both of which produce defective products. Two kinds of failure cost occur within the supply chain: internal and external. The supplier and the manufacturer determine their individual quality levels to maximise their own profits. We propose a partial cost allocation contract, under which the external failure cost is allocated between the manufacturer and the supplier at different rates based on information derived from failure root cause analysis. If the quality levels of the supplier and the manufacturer are observable, we show that the partial cost allocation contract coordinates the supply chain, provided that the failure root cause analysis does not erroneously identify the manufacturer’s fault as the supplier’s, and the supplier does not take responsibility for the manufacture’s fault. In the single moral hazard model, where only the quality level of the supplier is unobservable, the optimal share rates require the supplier to take some responsibility for the manufacture’s fault. However, in the double moral hazard model, where quality levels of the supplier and the manufacturer are unobservable to each other, the optimal share rates require the supplier not to take responsibility for the manufacturer’s fault. It is noted that the root cause analysis conducted by the manufacturer may have its disadvantage in attributing the fault to the supplier when both sides are at fault. We also propose a contract based on the dual root cause analysis to reduce the supplier’s penalty cost. Numerical results illustrate that the partial cost allocation contract satisfies the fairness criterion compared with the traditional cost allocation contract.     

Modularity analysis and commonality design: a framework for the top-down platform and product family design

With a highly fragmented market and increased competition, platform-based product family design is recognised as an effective method for constructing a product line that satisfies diverse customer demand while keeping design and production cost- and time-effective. Recognising the need for modularity and commonality in platform development, this paper presents a systematic framework to assist in implementing top-down platform and product family design, which aims to achieve system-level modularity for variety generation, and rationalise the commonality configuration for module instantiation. In the first phase of platform development, a robust and flexible product family architecture is constructed to accommodate variations by analysing the external varieties of the generic product architecture, and provide a modularity design space, wherein the design tasks are further decomposed into module instantiation. The second phase of detailed platform development aims to enhance commonality in terms of engineering efficiency by coordinating with the back-end product realisation stage. A tractable optimisation method is used to capture and resolve the trade-off between commonality configuration and individual product performance. A family of power tool designs is used to demonstrate the potential and feasibility of the proposed framework at the system level and detailed design stages.     

关注工业设计中的木质产品

回顾了木材使用史,提出了目前环境恶化资源匮乏的情况下,仍然对木质产品设计重视不够的问题;在结合木材的设计特性和关键技术的突破,介绍当前国际上对木质产品的关注以及现有的木质产品设计环境后,阐明木材十分契合绿色设计和可持续设计发展方向的观点;呼吁设计从业者和相关研究者积极参与到木质产品的设计研发和关键技术的突破创新工作中,更多地关注工业设计中的木质产品。     

An integrated framework for product line design for modular products: product attribute and functionality-driven perspective

The purpose of this research is to facilitate original equipment manufacturers operating in a single market segment to frame their product line design strategy that pertains to offering right product attributes with right attribute level in the right product profile within a market segment. Through this research, we attempt to establish a link between functional level design of product attributes with commercial objectives of the enterprise. Initially, by deriving the functional importance of product attribute levels of individual product attributes within a product profile, demand and functional importance data are generated. Utilising the function-based cost estimating framework and multi-linear regression methodology, we determine the cost and product development time coefficients for respective product attributes. Finally, a mixed integer quadratic programming-based mathematical formulation is developed that includes maximisation of product premium and minimisation of various costs as major objectives under the assumption that manufacturer seeks to offer optimal number of product profiles within the market segment. Employing the commercial solver LINGO, the integrated framework is solved. The entire framework is illustrated using the operator cabin of heavy construction machinery.     

A morphing method for shape generation and image prediction in product design

A shape morphing and image prediction method for product design is proposed in this article, in which a feature-based method is first used to construct 3-D CAD models of a product, then new shapes are generated with a shape morphing method and the images of the morphed shapes are analyzed using modified gray theory with Fourier residual correction. With the aid of this model, the designer can quickly obtain a product form and its corresponding image to help him/her to design the required product. Though LCD monitor design is applied, this method can also be used to develop other products.