Green Design – A Means to reduce Product Development Costs?
It is seen that for High Technology companies’ compliance to green related regulations required for market entry is the top pressure driving green product development. Most of the High Technology manufacturers have a green product development initiative in place, even more than other industries. They also seem to brand energy efficient technology as one of their top marketing strategies
It is clear, that while today High Technology manufacturers are focused on compliance to regulations like RoHS, REACH, WEE, TSCA, etc. they must look ahead and add cost reduction strategies around green design in their efforts in order to capture and sustain competitive advantage.
But doesn’t too much focus on compliance lead to increasing product development costs and affect their sustainability in the marketplace?? Let us see how successful High Technology manufacturers address this.
Green design refers to an approach to design of a product with special consideration for the environmental impacts of the product during its whole lifecycle. As the whole product life cycle should be regarded in an integrated perspective, representatives from advance development, design, production, marketing, purchasing and project management should work together on the design of a further developed or new product as they have together the best chance to predict the holistic effects of changes of the product and their environmental impact.
Let see some of the best practices adopted by High Technology manufacturers who have successfully embraced green design and are reaping the benefits.
• Have single source of product and process knowledge, enabling manufacturers to capture and trace compliance requirements and track compliance achievements across the entire product lifecycle.
• Use of concurrent engineering – change from a serial process of product development to a more parallel process
• Use of the latest green material selection available, from leading material suppliers
• Use of Six Sigma and quality techniques for process measurement, analysis and improvement to select optimum RoHS-compliant processes that will increase quality and reduce cost
• Use of standard performance criteria and test methods for compliance.
• Ensure supplier environmental qualification as a key part of the supplier sourcing, qualification, and quality control process.
• Validate product compliance throughout the development process in accordance with multiple environmental guidelines established by U.S., European Union and Asian governments.
• Provide an easy-to-use supplier portal which provides an automatic way to aggregate compliance data from your supply chain, eliminating time-consuming tracking and communication breakdowns that result in costly mistakes.
This broad scope of insight into the world of environmental compliance allows companies to improve product time-to-market, enhance customer satisfaction and meet regulatory directives. It is critical that the environmental compliance be managed early in the product development process because the costs associated with late-stage design changes can be enormous.
True green design leverages product development and provides following benefits:
• Improve product quality by removing information silos that prevent collaboration and reuse of intellectual property (IP)
• Provide accurate audit information and traceability by verifying and integrating product compliance specifics at every step of the product development process
• Speed time to market by avoiding late-stage design changes that often cause product delivery delays
• Lower costs by building compliance mandates into the product at the concept level
• Enhance brand identity by enabling the successful implementation of an green design strategy for product design
High Technology manufacturers that demonstrate green awareness and sustainability have the chance to increase their market share, enhance their brand image and drive revenue. Getting the greatest return-on-investment from eco-design will require manufacturers to think well beyond just meeting compliance regulations.
