Product Life Cycle Issues Analysis

Transcription

1 Product Life Cycle Issues Analysis Dr. Louis R. Nudy President, Eco Performance TM Ltd. This paper deals with suggestions for incorporating life cycle (LC) thinking into the earliest stages of new product development and the unique challenges of selecting the life cycle issues to consider when there are many uncertainties about the final product design. This is based primarily upon the experiences of the author in the development of new chemical raw materials used as intermediates and solvents. Introduction Individual life cycle assessment techniques and tools will not be discussed. It is hoped that a discussion of some of the unique criteria for applying life cycle thinking to the early stages of new product development will be of value. One such process for applying life cycle thinking to new products was developed at ARCO Chemical Company and is called Product Life Cycle Issues Analysis. The process is intended to bring together discussion of a broad number of environmental health and safety issues including but not limited to pollution prevention and waste minimization. Aspects of this Product Life Cycle Issue Analysis will also be discussed. The specific items to be discussed include; Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) application in the early stages of new product development. Advantages Disadvantages Guidelines for tool selection and application Deliverables Basic information needed to initiate Product Life Cycle Issues Analysis. Team selection for Product Life Cycle Issue Analysis Guidelines for the Product Life Cycle Issue Analysis team s efforts. Life Cycle Assessment application in the early stages of new product development Conceptually incorporating life cycle thinking into new product development makes sense. However, many of the life cycle tools available were developed for a specific category of products and with a predetermined list of issues to consider. The tools currently available are most easily applied to existing products with well defined compositions and known characteristics. Quite often there is detailed information available on at least one manufacturing process actually in operation when life cycle analysis is applied to products which have been already commercialized. Although quantitative verifiable data may be difficult to compile even for commercial products, new products present the added challenges of uncertainties including those of final product design specifications and production processes. 1

2 The process for new product development is often described in stages which typically include concept, feasibility, development, commercialization and established business stages. Companies may have more or less stages and define the boundaries differently. Typically it is during the development stage that the company begins significant investment. The investment may peak during the development stage or later stages depending upon the product. As one proceeds to commercialization, more information relevant to life cycle analysis and risk becomes available. More of the information is quantified and less uncertainty exists in the quantified information. Obviously, a LCA report resulting from data containing less uncertainty will be more credible and of better value in making future decisions. A staged approach to the life cycle analysis will help integrate it into new product development but not alleviate all the challenges. Advantages Despite the added challenges, there are several advantages to the early application of life cycle issues analysis in the new product development process. First, among the advantages are those related to cost savings. Since it is generally more costly to makes changes to production equipment after it is designed and installed, certain costs may be reduced or eliminated if designs needed for pollution prevention and waste minimization are built into the original design. After commercialization it is much harder to change product specifications without upsetting at least some portion of the market. Product specifications decisions which were made in the absence of thought to environmental health and safety issues associated with product use and disposal may be inadequate for at least some intended market. To often, chemical product specifications are set based solely on the physical and chemical functions desired of the product. But direct cost reductions are not the only benefits. During new product development, future commercialization is still uncertain. Information is being collected so that business managers can make decisions about invest further to develop and commercialize the product. Considering the environmental life cycle issues of the product early also helps identify more of the true cost of the product and provides product or business managers input that will help them make better decisions. By considering the entire life cycle, one may discover hidden costs of environmental burdens associated with the customers use of the new product that are not associated with a competitive product. It is much better that the business manager knows this so that he or she can attempt ways to overcome those burdens or at least factor the burdens into the development and commercialization decisions. Better still, one may find that a new product can compete better with existing products because it does not have the associated environmental burdens of an existing product. Again, it is advantageous to know this sooner rather than later. 2

3 Disadvantages Some additional challenges and disadvantages to the application of life cycle in the early stages also need to be considered. First, the product specification and process design assumptions that went into the life cycle are more likely to be changed after the earliest stages. During the early stages of chemical product development, all impurities inherent in the manufacturing process may not have been fully characterized yet. Even for those impurities that have been characterized, there may not be sufficient data to determine the performance and process trade offs associated with each. While zero impurities may be a good target, production costs often rise exponentially as one develops designs for higher and higher purity. It may not be ecologically beneficial to product a product of higher purity than needed. For example, more energy and sometimes more chemical process aids may needed to attain a higher purity. Secondly, data is generally incomplete and laboratory analysis of samples is based upon materials obtained from small scale laboratory experiments, pilot plants or in some cases mixtures produced in an attempt to mimic the final product anticipated from computer models of the process. Thus, there may be no samples from the actual product unit. This could be problematic if the properties reported and ecological tests done on the samples used in the life cycle analysis did not include certain impurities or had different concentrations of impurities that will effect the properties and ecological test results. An additional disadvantage is that the amount of data available is insufficient to credibly judge the reproducibility of analysis results. Finally, many new products fail in initial customer trials before becoming fully commercialized. Thus, there are no sales to offset the costs for the rigorous testing and life cycle analysis. If we still believe there is value in introducing life cycle thinking into the earliest stages of new product development, then we need to design life cycle tools that can be applied to the unique characteristics and challenges of the earliest stages of product development. Consider the typical stages involved in new product development from idea to concept development, commercialization and established business. Thus, while there are pro and cons associated with applying life cycle early, those of us who believe it can be beneficial need to provide our product development colleagues with appropriate tools. Guidelines for Tool Selection and Application Some simple guidelines for selecting LCA tools for the early stages of new product development, are proposed as follows; The most important and often overlooked guideline is to match the rigor of the tool to the amount of data available and the uncertainty in the data. The value and credibility of conclusions from the LCA is going to be limited by the uncertainty of the data and not the rigor of the LCA technique. The LCA tools available today which are very rigorous are also over developed for 3

4 the uncertainty inherent in the early stages of many new product development efforts. Applying some of these tools early in the new product development process is like trying to accurately weigh several tons of a powder using a precision microbalance. If you apply the rigorous LCA tools at the earliest stages, you will find yourself frequently having to redesign the calculations and reluctant to apply the technique to all the possible product design variations and choices. Using simple screening tools facilitates the second guideline which is to apply the simple screening techniques to all the life cycle stages and include consideration of the relative potential health, safety and environmental burdens, impacts or risks involved with each. Sometimes because certain LCA tools are so burdensome, they are consciously not applied to certain options being considered or some of the life cycle stages are left out of the analysis. Thus, one may have a very rigorous report on a narrow set of options and circumstances that may not be very representative of the final commercialized product and circumstances of manufacture, distribution, use and disposal. Using electronic tools can make even some of the more rigorous tools easier to apply. In such cases the more rigorous tools should be considered so long as this is not done at the expense of not considering certain stages or options. Also, be prepared to have to recalculate projected environmental outcomes or repeat the entire LCA based upon revised data. Deliverables Even when less rigorous life cycle screening techniques are applied, the results can be useful. In the absence of firm conclusions from more rigorous life cycle assessments, the following should be the expectations of any life cycle screening applied to new product development. There should be an identification of the more rigorous life cycle assessment techniques and the environmental data and costs that will be needed as the product proceeds to commercializations. Using the screening tools is not meant to be a substitute for applying more rigorous tools when the product and data set becomes more developed. Gross comparisons of the type of environmental burdens associated with different options and different portions of the life cycle should be summarized. A list of the regulatory compliance issues that must be addressed at current and future stages should be an outcome of the PLCIA. There should be complete documentation of all the product, manufacture, market and distribution plans that were used in the PLCIA as well as all the physical, chemical, biological and ecological data available. The documentation should include a road map to retrieve to original test data and reports. There should be a list of experts who participated in the PLCIA so that they can be called upon to help answer future questions. Opportunities arising from different pollution prevention costs associated with different options To the extent that the PLCIA team was successful, the PLCIA report should identify opportunities to develop pollution prevention advantages over competitive products, 4

5 management systems that may be needed to further reduce environmental burdens and the estimates of pollution prevention and waste costs. Basic Information needed to initiate new product life cycle issues At the early stages of new product development, the key is to expand choices and considerations rather than restrict them. Thus a tool should be flexible. One approach used by ARCO Chemical Company involved formation of a Product Life Cycle Issues Analysis (PLCIA) Team. The PLCIA is designed to facilitate discussion regarding available data but does not assign predetermined values to different potential impacts including pollution and wastes. It merely facilitates the teams consideration of a variety of environmental health and safety risks, burdens or impacts and allows the team to engage in informed deliberation on the best options to pursue further. The value is that life cycle thinking is done in concert with the product development stages. The PLCIA process includes questions the team should answer or discuss at each stage of new product development. Some of the categories of questions are as follows; Some example questions in the concept stage are shown and this is usually answered by the product designer who is typically not trained in EH&S but trained in chemistry or chemical engineering. The questions do not, in of themselves, necessitate any particular level of detail but rather depend upon the judgement of the team members including at least one environmental expert along with experts in other related areas. This method allows for a great deal of discretion by the team and consequently places a large burden upon the environmental professional to select the important issues the team should consider. The environmental professionals on the team have the added burden to help the other team members understand the importance of the issues and engage them in finding means to deal effectively with the environmental burdens that may be associated with the product Team Selection for Product Life Cycle Issue Analysis Specialists in waste reduction and pollution prevention can provide better options when they are better informed about the product specifications, process design, packaging and distribution plans, end uses and disposal. A team approach that brings together other specialists in addition to the environmental specialists provides the opportunity for discovering synergistic efforts and avoid mutual exclusive or conflicting objectives. Risk trade offs also become more apparent and product management plans should be more readily implemented through a coordinated comprehensive approach. A team should include representatives of functions including product management, market management, sales, customer support, logistics, industrial hygiene, toxicology, chemistry, engineering,manufacturing and legal. Other specialists should be asked to either participate on the team or provide advice as needed. The more functions represented the greater the opportunity for coordinated and efficient efforts provided that the meetings are well organized and information is shared and reviewed in advance by all participants. 5

6 Guidelines for PLCIA Teams Efforts Participants in the PLCIA need to understand their roles and the scope of their input into the process. Electronic mail and databases should be used so that information can be readily documented and available to all members as soon as new information is obtained. The participants should understand the expectations of each meetings and should view PLCIA as a continuing process rather than a project. Individuals should be assigned tasks or projects as part of the PLCIA but they should recognize that they may need to re-evaluate their input and conclusions as new data becomes available from other members of the team. There is no lack of protocols and procedures for the evaluation of a variety of environmental health and safety issues. The challenge of the PLCIA team and new product development manager is to utilize the appropriate tools in a manner that will improve the manner in which their product is managed throughout its life cycle. Closing Comments LCA can be and should be applied to the early stages of new product development. But, it requires a flexible and iterative approach that includes input from a variety of business, research and development and environmental, health and safety professionals. The LCA should not be viewed as box checking exercise but should be an integral part of the entire new business process. Acknowledgments The following individuals and references were instrumental in shaping the views expressed by the author of this paper. However, it should not be assumed that this paper is a representation of or is entirely consistent with the references or individuals acknowledged which include; ARCO Chemical Company Product Risk Management Manual and the employee contributors, Winning at New Products by Robert C. Cooper, Roy F. Weston Life Cycle Analysis Roundtable members, and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment by Mary Ann Curran. 6