The need to prevent crossing planetary boundaries has accelerated sustainable product development and production research. This resulted in the introduction of tools and methods to support the development of sustainable products. However, practice is still challenged by changing requirements, regulations, guidelines, and a plethora of tools. This study aims to identify different tools and methods that support transferring sustainability aspects into technical requirements during product and production development through a systematic literature review in Scopus. The search was limited to articles in the engineering, manufacturing sector, and journal or conference publications in the period between 2014 and 2024. Multiple authors were involved in the selection process to avoid bias. 56 articles were selected and analyzed based on purpose, user, production support, and utilization of the requirements management process. Results indicated that good support for product development and design engineers exists, but not for production, product production co-development, and other stakeholders. A need for a requirements management-based method to support the integration of sustainability aspects during product production co-development is identified. A research framework and three research strands are proposed based on this identified need, which will be developed as future work. Exclusion criteria can introduce some limitations, but the review provides an extensive overview of existing methods and gaps.

Product portfolio and long-term predictions are required to develop production lines. However, the predictions are influenced by changing customer needs, regulations, geopolitical issues and circular strategies. Production lines are expensive, and both product and production systems should be designed for planned and unplanned changes. Production Feature Asset and a method to use these are proposed where production requirements are embodied at the interface of product-production systems. Production Feature Asset supports continuous collaboration between the product and production development domains by providing product artefacts that are purposely designed to facilitate production, enabling reuse of production lines and sustainability knowledge.

Product development is multidisciplinary with high uncertainties necessitating coordinated decision-making between design and production. This paper presents a method to work with production requirements to support production preparation during product development aligned with different product and production maturities. The work was conducted in collaboration with two global manufacturing firms. The method supports identification, definition, and structuring of production requirements and the collaboration between design and production engineers for requirement prioritization and follow-up. 

The production preparation process (3P) enables collaboration between design and production engineers during product development but its efficiency is limited by the abundance of documentation of manufacturing constraints and capabilities. Empirical studies showed that use of production requirements can increase the efficiency of 3P, however, the support for production engineers to capture and share production requirements is scarce. A method to support production engineers in identifying, defining, structuring and sharing production requirements and collaborating with design engineers is presented. The method has three major parts - focus areas and requirement categories, a worksheet for production requirements capturing and prioritization, and a workflow for using the worksheet. The method was developed in collaboration with practitioners and contributes to the existing knowledge by providing production engineers with a structured way of working with production requirements. Evaluation of the method in the case company showed its usability when developing product variants and that additional work is needed to support the development of new product families and assembly lines.

Industrialized housebuilding (IHB) is a sector within the construction trade where product platforms have been introduced from the mechanical industry to manage the product architecture and allow mass customization. The aim of this study is to analyze product development projects connected to the product platform and the production. For IHB, the backbone is a technical platform where components are designed and combined. Clients are satisfied, avoiding compromising the technical platform and the product architecture of the different variants. However, the adaptation to production is decisive and production has increased automation, with less flexibility in relation to the products. Still, product development has focused on the engineering view and the development of building components which fit in the predefined or well-established production facility while at the same time satisfy customer demands, i.e., maintaining the balance between distinctiveness and commonality. The study has observed one IHB company and two of their development projects focusing on changes in the product architecture for components across several of their product families. The development has been carried out in a bottom-up fashion. The results indicate difficulties in finding solutions, which fit production. An integrated design of production obstructs product development; the selection of project participants may affect the project results, both in terms of prior experience but also the problem-solving ability; the lack of project documentation is costly since experience is not captured, which could be recycled in future developments.

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to support the customization ability for industrial house building companies striving to offer individualized products but with a strategy which includes a production facility. This is accomplished by analyzing the as-is state in terms of existing engineering assets and by proposing a to-be state using the design platform and product lifecycle management (PLM) support.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is based on design research methodology and collected data are in-depth interviews, document reviews and workshops and method development. The theoretical baseline is product platforms and the design platform.

Findings

The analysis showed that despite use of a platform, inherent assets are disorganized. Still, the identified object-based engineering assets were possible to include in a conceptual proposal for better management, both in the process and product view, using an asset relationship matrix and a PLM system.

Practical implications

The results should be applicable for industrial house building and off-site construction companies and offers an approach to identify and manage their assets and platforms which are crucial to stay competitive.

Originality/value

Previous research on design platforms has focused on engineer-to-order companies within the mechanical industry. The contribution of this paper lies in the application and support of the design platform for industrial house building and the introduction of PLM system support.

A vast body of research has described product platforms as strategic enablers for increased business competitiveness, but there is a lack of empirical research describing what types of assets that are used in industry as elements in a platform. Previous research has suggested a platform as a “collection of assets shared by a group of products” and also classified these assets into four transdisciplinary categories: Components, Processes, Knowledge and People and Relationships. This categorization is, however, too imprecise to identify the core assets needed to build a platform, and better guidance is needed. This paper presents a cross-case study of assets used in the product development process at two case companies. These represent two different product disciplines: Industrialized housebuilding, a sector within the construction trade, and Outdoor Power Equipment producing forest and gardening tools. The main contribution of the paper is a comparison of what formal and informal design assets that are used in the two disciplines.

Industrialised house building (IHB) design incurs complexities as extensive engineering are required due to high customisation. Companies use different production strategies (PS) to develop building components ranging from standardised to customised depending on the requirements. Platform-based product development has received increased attention from IHB companies striving to be competitive in the industry. However, strategies for platform development supporting the design process are not well-defined for companies using a combination of PS in their development. This study proposes a framework using different PS in the development of a product platform to support the design phase of the post and beam IHB system. Empirical data were gathered from a Swedish multistorey house building company. The main contribution of this study is to provide insights into production strategies while designing components. Moreover, the case is used to exemplify how different subcomponents of the building system can be classified into production strategies and facilitate postponement of strategies to achieve platformbased development. The potential application of different support tools and methods in incremental platform development has been presented.

The introduction of product platforms has been acknowledged as a strategic enabler for increased business competitiveness. A vast body of research has described different aspects of platforms, but little work has been done on defining or delimiting the different types of elements that may build up a platform. Design assets include platform elements that are not commonly considered as a part of a platform. Previous research has suggested the introduction of formalized design assets to systematically extend an items-based platform with intangible elements. These are transdisciplinary objects, specifically prepared for reuse between projects to provide support for a wide range of engineering activities: specialized CAD geometry, working methods, spread sheets, function models or different types of knowledge representations, among others. The presented research is part of a larger project seeking to improve the collaboration between product development and manufacturing. This paper focuses on the use of potential and formal design assets at a development department of a global manufacturer of consumer products. The results show that the application of formal design assets depends on several factors, such as the level of professional experience and individual working styles. The contribution of the paper is a description of which formal and informal design assets that are used and a discussion on how the formal assets can be better utilized.

Design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA) has gained increased attention in the construction industry as the process has been industrialized and shifting towards a combination of factory prefabrication and assembly on site. The aim of this study is two-fold. Firstly, to apply the DfMA approach in the redesign of a steel bracket from a post and beam building system to simplify the design for reducing the cost and improving manufacturability. Secondly, to experimentally evaluate the mechanical properties of the redesigned bracket for implementation. An experimental case study has been conducted in a multistorey post and beam building system. The empirical data were collected from five semi-structured interviews and two workshops.

The result shows that the DfMA approach has the potential to improve the manufacturability and cost of building components in Industrialized house building (IHB) and is comparable to lean design. Moreover, the proposed steel bracket offers satisfactory load-bearing capacities and shows an improvement with a reduction of cost by 15%, lead time by 50%, and material efficiency by 25%. DFMA can be used as a promising approach for aligning the design phases of IHB with the production and assembly by improving cross-functional collaboration.