Product Life Cycle Position

Mission and vision Product portfolio analysis Product life-cycle position Generic strategy... 

Owing to its comprehensiveness, LCA is a powerful tool for comparing different options/products with respect to their potential impacts on the environment, and for identifying the critical points within the product life-cycle that contribute most to these impacts [15]. This approach can be used, for example, for comparing a product that includes ENMs with similar products without ENMs. The added benefits of the use of ENMs may be reflected in the differences in the energy consumption for production of materials or products [29, 30], or in the use of scarce resources in the production processes. In other words, LCA may be used to assess the relative environmental performance of nanoproducts in comparison with their conventional equivalents. Thereby, LCA may also quantify the expected positive potentials of nanoproducts for the substitution of hazardous chemicals, the reduction in the use of materials, and energy consumption, in addition to waste reduction. 

Instrument vendors generally react positively to this. For example, most vendors develop and validate analytical products following documented product life cycles. Products are shipped with a Declaration of System Validation or similar documents that certify that the specific product was developed and validated following the product life cycle process. Most vendors are also certified for ISO 9001 and some also for ITQS or Ticklt. Some vendors also make further information on development and testing available to the user on special request, and some guarantee accessibility of the source code to regulatory agencies. 

A giant break in the thinking in most companies is the shift from a functional orientation focused on source, make, and deliver processes — a budgetary view — to a product orientation where the needs of products or product categories are paramount — not a common view. When there are multiple products or product families in a company, the product life cycle model describes each product s position in its market. Figure 5.2... 

Information about products, including life cycle position... 

In the last chapter, we examined three frameworks, or models, that offer different ways to think about supply chain strategy. The model described in this chapter uses the "product life cycle" to define the product s position in its competitive market. The model helps us imderstand the relative importance of supply chain features, as distinct from product features, to long-term product success. It also brings into play the notion of time-criticality in supply chain innovation. As George Stalk noted in his article, time can be the dominant element in a strategy. 

We ve also noted that new products are moving more and more rapidly through the quadrants of the product position grid (refer to Figure 5.1). This is reflected in the shortened product life cycles common in newer products. So we believe it will be even more important than ever to plan the supply chain along with the product s movement across this grid. As the product moves from one quadrant to another, the supply chains need to change. 

Supply uncertainty is also strongly affected by the life-cycle position of the product. New products being introduced have higher supply uncertainty because designs and production processes are still evolving. In contrast, mature products have less supply uncertainty. 

The international product-life-cycle suggested that many commercially successful innovations were developed in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century because the per-capita-income in the United States was the highest in the world (Vernon 1971). As other countries caught up and reached the level of per- capita-income that the United States had at the time the innovation was demanded in the United States, the same demand for the new product emerged in these markets as well. In general, the wealth of a nation has frequently been empirically proven to have a positive effect on the rate and time of adoption (see the literature review by Dekimpe et al. 1998c). 

The empirical analysis of the hypotheses, however, can be difficult, because of multicolinearity between local production and local market attractiveness. Product-life-cycle theory suggests that foreign production activities are closely related to local market volume. To include foreign production volume and foreign market volume as exogenous variables could potentially lead to an unidentifiable regression matrix. Most of the earlier studies that include variables for production activities in the host country in their statistical analyses find a positive relationship to R D activities. 

MID are subjected to different mechanical loads in the course of their product life cycle. Automotive applications for MID are a case in point. Vibrations and mechanical shock loading are common, for example when a vehicle drives over potholes. These load profiles are mapped in vibration tests such as are specified in the ISO 16750 standard. The module is clamped on to a linear motor, known as the shaker, capable of accelerations several times that of the Earth s gravity. The scope of testing includes the adhesive strength of the metallization at the points of connection to (heavy) electronic components. When tests of this nature are conducted, it is important for the load profile and also the clamping of the MID on the shaker to match the specifics of mounting and installed position in the parent system. This is to ensure compliance with the real-life package requirements for the MID. 

When a single technique is employed only local life-cycle cost minimization is achieved. If the global life-cycle cost is to be minimized, a number of techniques have to be applied (Watson et al., 1996). In this case, tools and techniques shouldn t compete with each other, but be complementary in the product development process. The correct positioning of the various off-line tools and techniques in the product development process, therefore, becomes an important consideration in their effective usage. Patterns of application have been proposed by a number of workers over several years (Brown et al., 1989 Jakobsen, 1993 Norell, 1993) and the importance of concurrency has been highlighted as a critical factor in their use (Poolton and Barclay, 1996). 

Since FAS can be produced either from vegetable oil based or petrochemical-based fatty alcohol (Fig. 4.9), both types have been evaluated in a life-cycle analysis with a positive overall result for the natural based product. With vegetable-based fatty alcohol sulfate, the analysis starts with the harvesting of the oil fruits (palm kernels or coconuts) and their processing to isolate the desired plant oil. Subsequent transesterification and hydrogenation of the methyl ester intermediates lead to the fatty alcohols, which are finally sulfated to produce the desired product. Based on this analysis the environmental impact of vegetable oil based fatty alcohol sulfate compared with the petrochemical based product is as follows ... 

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