Impact of various issues on extending the useful life of a product through product recovery options

Jnl Remanufactur (2017) 7:77–95 DOI 10.1007/s13243-017-0034-6 RESEARCH Impact of various issues on extending the useful life of a product through product recovery options Kampan Mukherjee 1 & Sandeep Mondal 2 & Kaustov Chakraborty 2 Received: 15 March 2017 / Accepted: 27 April 2017 / Published online: 10 July 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract Due to the growing consciousness towards environment and stringent governmental legislations, manufacturers are incorporating product recovery activities in their business processes. In product recovery process, used products are collected after their end-of-use from the customers and their retained usable values are recovered through value additive operations. The product recovery options not only reduce the disposal of wastes but also extend the useful life of product. In this paper, we try to identify various issues from literature review, which influence the extension of useful life of products through product recovery options. These issues are further classified into five major decision areas namely product design issues, operational issues, market related issues, governmental rules and legislations, and societal issues. The contextual relationships among these set of issues are studied by using Fuzzy Interpretive Structural Modelling (FISM), which reflects different levels of influence. Two case studies are highlighted here to compare the contextual relationships among these decision-making issues. The issues in the highest-level act as the prime enablers which trigger the extension of product life and help in formation of corporate strategies. The issues in the lower level generally act as operational issues. Keywords Product lifecycle . Product recoveryoptions . Fuzzy Interpretivestructural modelling Introduction Any product undergoes several phases in its product life cycle. These phases are extraction of raw material, production of finished product, its use and after its use finally disposal. We can also describe the product life cycle as the total sales turnover of the product over a time period. * Kampan Mukherjee 1 Indian Institute of Management, Kashipur, India 2 Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, India 78 Jnl Remanufactur (2017) 7:77–95 Useful life of the product is the duration of time period in which the items remain useful to the customer. End user environments, frequency of use are some factors which affect the useful life of the product. After its useful life, the product is usually disposed to the environment resulting in pollution, landfill or incineration. So, there is the necessity of evolving some activities which can control pollution, avoid land filling or incineration and preserve the natural resources. One such approach is product recovery operation. By the product recovery operation, we can retrieve the retained used value from the used product. Different product recovery options are repair, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, cannibalization and recycling. Using these aforesaid options, we can extend the useful life of the product, shown in Fig. 1. The aim of the useful life extension of the product is to reduce the environmental impact in long run, while increasing the societal and economic value of the product. The first step of the product recovery operation is to collect the used products from the end users. The used products are then sorted, disassembled, repaired or remanufactured, reassembled and sold in the market. From the literature review, we have identified different issues which have significant impact in useful life extension of a product. These issues are clustered into five main groups such as Design of product, Operational issue, Market of remanufactured product, Government legislation and Environmental Consciousness, shown in Table 1. The objective of the paper is to study the contextual relationships among the identified issues in Table 1. Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) along with type −1 Fuzzy set theory is used to draw the contextual relationships. Two case examples are considered in this paper to illustrate the Fuzzy Interpretive Structural Modelling (FISM) methodology. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In “Fuzzy interpretive structural modelling (FISM)”section we discussed on Fuzzy Interpretive structural modelling (FISM). In “Illustration with an example” section we used FISM methodology to find the structural relationship between the identified issues for extension of useful life of the product, which is followed by discussion and conclusion in fourth and fifth section respectively. Fuzzy interpretive structural modelling (FISM) Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is classified into two categories, Classical MCDM method and Fuzzy MCDM method [27]. In classical MCDM methods individual preferences are usually represented by numbers, expressing exact degree of preferences of decision makers. On the other hand, in Fuzzy MCDM individual preferences are expressed by linguistic Extension of useful life Raw material Extraction Production Usage Disposal Repair/Reuse Remanufacturing Fig. 1 Product life cycle and extension of useful life (Adopted from Kobayashi H. [1]) Jnl Remanufactur (2017) 7:77–95 79 Table 1 Issues identified from the literature review Issues Sub Issues 1. Operational Mondal and Mukherjee [2], Galberth and Blackburn [3], Teunter et al. [4], Wassenhove et al. [5], Guide et al. [6], Fergunson et al. [7]; Fleischmann et al. [8]; El. Saadany [9]; Fleischmann et al. [10] Design of fasteners, modular design, design Shu and Flowers [11], Ijomah et al. [12], Go et al. [13]; Zwolinski et al. [14], Kimura for cleaning (DfC), Design for inspection et al. [15], Brennan et al. [16], Desai and (DfI), part complexity, minimization of Mittal [17] number of parts Subramaniom et al. [18]; Atasu et al. [19], Identification of market, attitude of the Parra et al. [20], Ostlin et al. [21], Rathore customers, selling price of et al. [22] remanufactured product. Johnson et al. [23]; Xiang and Miang [24] 2. Product design 3.Market of remanufactured product 4. Governmental Laws & Legislations 5.Environmental consciousness References Collection process, disassembly, reconditioning, reassembly, inventory, production planning & control Gungor and Gupta [25], Ilgin and Gupta [26] terms to indicate the hesitation or imprecision related to the preferences. Interpretive Structural Modelling or ISM (developed by Warfield, 1973 [28]) is a well-known classical structural MCDM method. ISM depicts structural relationships between the issues or factors in the system. The input data for modelling the relationships are obtained from experts. Many researchers [29–31] have used ISM methodology in different situations like reverse logistics, remanufacturing, offshore alliances etc. In this paper, we incorporate the fuzzy logic in the ISM model for structuring the relations among various i (...truncated)