This EU demand suggests a number of manufacture/service industries to apply new strategies to join product design and manufacture, with life-cycle and dismissal manage- ment. For the last decade, the information technology sector made big advances. It made it possible to address value chains, delivering products and services, supported by cooperating organisations. This type of change opened horizons to enable new businesses, such as SE, embedding high-intensity information, with enhanced transparency of the material resources decay and with increased intangible added value. These paradigms make it possible for networked companies to be more competitive, improving after-sale service, products duty upgrading, and recovery. In some cases, to excel in servicing, maintenance and recycling Figure 1. PLM and SE business paradigms
Market Product – Servce
Value Chain
Product – Service Value Chain Marketng
Product Desgn
Process Plannng
Factory Plannng Engneerng
Chan
Product Lfecycle Management
Support Actvtes Chan
Operatons Chan
Producton Plannng
Producton Control Producton Schedulng
Functonal Concept
Human Resource
Concept
Marketng Concept Capablty
Analyss
Market Analyss
Idea Fndng
Idea Descrpton
Idea Assessment Servce Plannng
Servce Engneerng
Servce Concepton
Implementaton Plannng
Detaled ER Plan
Plot Implementaton
Provdng Servces Resource Setup Procurement
Sales Dstrbuton After sales Qualty Mantenance
areas are the critical means for a company to be a winner on the market. Indeed, the full acknowledgement of the technical conformance of a product at the point-of-use is a non- eliminable request, to comply with eco-consistency incumbents, and the reliable assessment and recording of life cycle falls-off become standard duty, to certify items sustainability achievements. Actually, economical return is standard reference to support remuneration to the whole flow:
• Forward.value.chain: materials procurement, product design manufacture and test- ing, items distribution, selling, and conformance upkeeping and maintenance
• Backward.value.chain: exhausted goods collection and forwarding to dismissal;
selective dismantling with recovering/shredding; second-hand materials sorting and enhancement; and residuals dumping
Now, the single steps have consignors and assignors, but, most of the backward chain outcomes do not have explicit purchasers, lacking links to actual needs. Thus, separating backward, from forward chain will authorise deviating issues, to keep benefits within a subset of actors, while damaging third (and future) parties. The cost/profit ratio is, then, to be assessed balancing the advantage of stakeholders (manufacturers and users) against protection of all the people not involved by the specific value chain. In that sense, regulation for eco-impact is a peremptory task that governments need to undertake, enacting sets of rules for charging the consumers’ side for environmental fall-offs linked to the whole sup- ply chain, dismissal and recycling incumbents included. These are leading the EU Council to expand the suppliers’ responsibility to the point of withdrawal of basic mass products (white and brown household appliances, automotive vehicles, etc.), as shared commitment, established at the point of sale, when suppliers earn for their work, and clients purchase to satisfy their whims. A similar rule does not appear for conformance-to-use requests, and these are left to the drawing-up of voluntary agreements; but, in this case, explicit buyers exist, with largely expressed needs.
All in all, however, the underlying organisations and technologies present noteworthy similarities, with unifying reference in service engineering, characterising issue in extended artefacts, and enabling support in extended enterprises. Basically, today one should mainly distinguish the economical instruments: voluntary agreements, for on-duty conformance management; and compulsory regulations, for recovery targets. The latter, enforceable market, in this way, could anticipate the former, unless pioneering enterprises establish.
The ICT aids play a fundamental role in developing the whole. Moving to lifelong concern, knowledge-driven frames are a necessary prerequisite, to make possible assessing items impact and resources decay. These frames build up on three facts:
1. Marketing extended artefacts, with collaborative networks to support clients’ re- quests
2. Involvement of extended enterprises, assuring point-of-service conformance guaran- tees
3. Overseeing third-party certifying bodies, to record the tangibles yield per unit ser- vice
The collaborative networks, thereafter, face hierarchical topologies:
• Inner.cluster:.to link the extended enterprise partners, for extended artefact deliv- ery
• Specialised. links: to support the point-of-service communication with individual buyers
• Selective.data.channels: to give access to the certifying bodies under security pro- tocols
The varying-topology information setup is shared context, sliced into layers, with the:
• Lowest: (artefact ideation and construction), within the extended enterprise inner cluster
• Intermediate: (artefact life cycle), for the data management at the clients’ satisfac- tion
• Highest: (artefact sustainability and tangibles charges), ruled by the certifying bod- ies
The picture is coherent with a controlled collaborative net, connecting extended enterprise to individual clients, so that the supply chain of the delivered extended artefact is available to an accredited certifying body, for conformance assessment purposes. The e-maintenance systems and reverse logistics are qualifying features of the new business options. The former is one example of the ICT solutions for the tasks considered in SE. These systems vary from product supported or from engineering/business field of application. Like PLM solutions, their may consist of different modules and tools. Some modules can evaluate the products, machines, or other equipment without human intervention, or adjust the monitored objects to avoid breakdowns or undesirable situations. In the following, details on the technologies and enabling methods are discussed, to understand and implement a very characteristic option: proactive maintenance, based on the ubiquitous computing and communication of ambient intelligence. Moreover, the backward value chain could help in explaining how the economical instruments change the business ratability. The reverse logistics is the process of designing, planning, and controlling the return and reuse of worn-out products, in order to conserve resources and protect the environment. Profitability through the backward value chain requires boosting facts (Acaccia, Michelini, & Qualich, 2005; Dekker, Fleischmann, Inderfurth, & van Wassenhove, 2004; Dyckhoff, Lackes, & Reese, 2004; Michelini & Raz- zoli, 2003), such as the following:
• Closed.loop.supply.chains: grounded on standards for parts/materials recovering
• Tendency.to.remanufacture: based on design for reuse, instead of disposal destina- tion
• Collection.and.disassembly.organisations: with effective facilities for worn-out goods
• Sorting,. retrieval,. and. reintegration. processes:.to extract assessed quality re- sources
• Account.of.material.and.energy.whole.provisions: to repay the net caused decay
• Recognition.of.every.emerging.impact:.to pay for the remediation and restoring incumbents
• Exhaustive.information.frames:.for product data life cycle certified monitoring and vaulting
• Objective.tax.collection: for all tangibles withdrawals, to establish fair-trade com- petition
These are a mix of legal and technical prescriptions. The economical return of reverse logistics activities is the current challenge for the coming years, at least, in trading of already regulated durables and consumables. To those goals, it is especially relevant to develop decision aids for backward supply chains, and to compare collecting, dispatching, re-manufacturing, and disposal processes, determining drawbacks/benefits each time they are reached.
Service.Engineering.and.Quality-Certifying.Bodies
The critical nature of eco-consistency is differently perceived, today, with stress on weigh- ing current versus future targets, and local versus global needs, according to rather opaque procedures. This results in a wavering gait, with large pressure on given domains or details, and odd thoughtlessness in other cases. The selection of the durables/consumables domains, for example, to regulate by compulsory recover/reuse/recycle targets is, possibly, explained by the impact they are provoking, negatively, as for the wreck quantities, and positively, as for the psychological issues; indeed, everyone happens, several times in his life, to be involved in waste-electric-and-electronic-equipment and end-of-life vehicles.
The relevance of the ICT tracks emerges with emphasis, directly, because of the explicit attention towards high-tech industry and technological excellence promotion, and indi- rectly, because of the instrumental role played in assuring supply chains with maximum value-added in intangibles, and in providing effective technologies for service engineering along goods life cycle, dismissal included. This chapter is especially concerned with the second track, namely, instrumental exploitation of ICT tools. The role is multifarious, with characterising property, the information intensity. For the present purposes, the stress is in visibility of the generated eco-impact, with certified assessment of actually-induced effects of on-duty artefacts (for allowed exploitation, with positive conformance-to-use checks) and of end-of-life goods (for recover/reuse/recycle and dump operations according to law). The business vastness and complexity extent are immediately evident, since progressively all material flows need be monitored and recorded, explicitly associating suppliers and clients.
Results ought to be reported to national agencies/authorities (and notified to EU officers, which verify their compliance), in keeping with proper data handling and vaulting caution, granting citizens privacy and security. For the ecological requirements, service engineering shall, accordingly, fulfil two goals:
1. Cover the servicing side of the extended artefact supply, such as: the (tangible and intangible) delivery to a client, granting enjoyment of specified functions, by life-cycle indentures, ruled by extended enterprises, with return on investment, by recourse to scope economy.
2. Accomplish the monitoring and control of the environmental impact, reporting the results to overseeing certified bodies, namely, third parties (independent of dealers and purchasers) with access to thewhole supply chain, charged to assess and record the products life-cycle data.
The two goals are actually deeply connected, since users are, in both cases, the beneficiaries, to keep goods operation reliability and eco-conformance (Blumberg, 2004; Chan & Lee, 2005; Corafas, 2001; Dekker et al., 2004; Michelini & Kovacs, 1999).
To deal with eco-servicing, the information framework lumps together purveyors and us- ers, both subject to the monitoring of independent (and duly accredited) supervisors. The three parties ruling seems to be good compromise to enhance competition, grant privacy, and balance responsibility, under fair-trade rules. Then, transparency of the environment impact is achieved by continuous monitoring and recording actual running conditions of the forward and the backward cycle. The governmental agencies collect charges for consumed tangibles, assessed by the authorised certifying bodies. The three parties scheme includes (Krutwagen & van Kampen, 1999; Vernadat, 1996):
• Purveyors: covering the entire supply-chain: materials provision, items manufacture, life-cycle upkeeping, backward recovery; the eco-responsibility is dealt with by clus- tering several firms within a factual alliance of cooperating multi-sectional interests businesses
• Users:.purchasing extended artefacts (products and services), to profit of the delivered functions with reliability figure close to one; the payments shall include conformance certification at the point of service, after tax collection against tangibles depletion
• Supervisors:.assuring third party incumbents for (today and tomorrow) environment and society protection; the certifying bodies report to governmental authorities and use objective standards, having access to the extended artefacts life-cycle databases On such grounds, third party certification builds up as competition-driven service:
• The joint-consumers’ side lets out (on contract) the overseeing incumbents and the related conformance assessments, but can, any time, change the certifying body.
• The authorities are entitled to rule the legal frames, but without any direct involvement in data keeping and recording, accomplished under proper secrecy by parcelled-out services.