Recommendation: Top Management Support: Development of an Integrated Sustainable NPD-SSCM Strategy, Resource Allocation, Financial Support, and Common, Shared Information System • Set the sustainable vision, mission, scope, goals, and explicit strategic targets that effectively direct NPD decisions towards sustainable products. • Develop a cohesive sustainable NPD strategy as well as a green company policy. • Align the organization and its associated supply chains toward delivering sustainable products and services. • Support through resource allocation, financial support, and a common, shared information system. • Develop specific managerial skills and coordinate processes for all three aspects of sustainability. • Adopt proactive supply chain practices. • Align sustainable NPD through processes and products. • Provide process management support through buyer-supplier integration and such activities as creating a management-level sustainability position and employee sustainability training. • Encourage social sustainable development through increasing designer social knowledge, improving transparency, and encouraging fair trade practices. • Support the development of a common, shared database for integration. • Negotiate NPD-SSCM application and align with products and processes. • Develop a green company policy. • Create a management sustainability position. • Increase management knowledge through entrepreneurial and innovation skills.
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Recommendation: Focus on marketing demands. • Develop market planning initiatives with a focus on end customer requirements. • Incorporate sustainability into NPD by evaluating product safety for the end-user. • Detect marketing needs for ecological and social demands and restrictions. • Evaluate market changes to comply with company goals, resources, and capabilities. • Analyze the market for sustainable needs and capabilities. • Develop procedures and rules to encourage green NPD development. • Evaluate consumer's care for the environment and community – and how much they are willing to pay to support these concerns – and develop appropriate sustainability strategies. • Manage environmental impact through goal-oriented and market-based mechanisms that provide flexibility. • Consider market orientation, green targeting, green positioning, and customer outcomes influence green NPD. • Use structured management processes to bridge market and process management.
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Recommendation: Supplier/Customer Integration • Select partners with the same guiding sustainability principles. • Co-evolving, collaboration, and joint development of products and processes that discourage pollution. Prevention and innovative environmental technologies, joint knowledge development, and development of a code of conduct. • Use environmental requirements in the process of selecting new suppliers as well as the continual evaluation of existing suppliers. • Develop closer relationship with suppliers by holding regular meetings for enhanced communication, activities that focus on communication and trust-building toward better relationships, and a focus on improving joint decision-making. • Encourage a moderate level of cross-functional integration, and either a low or high level of customer integration into NPD efforts. • Encourage collaboration and communication between supply chain members through procedures that encourage a proactive sustainability approach. • Identify risks associated with environmental and social problems prior to public exposure. • Analyze the entire product lifecycle. • Develop partners through assistance and teach new methods, training, providing expert knowledge, and financial support. • Information and data flow between supply chain members encourages collaboration and NPD efforts are more effective. • Institute activities that ensure that suppliers use environmentally sensitive procedures. • Pay attention to monetary and non-monetary costs of implementing integration practices in NPD that may outweigh the benefits. A moderate level of cross-functional integration but either a low or extensive level of customer integration (not moderate) in NPD is recommended. • Encourage social sustainability in the form of decent working conditions by supplier employees by providing training and expert knowledge.
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Recommendation: Integrated Networks (Practices/Processes & Information Technology Management) • Streamline formal processes and coordination between the stakeholders. • Use product data management, process improvement management, and engineering project management to address the globally-dispersed processes that extend across departments, companies, and international borders. • Incorporate Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) best practices into sustainable NPD, including formalization of processes (such as product-focused sustainable data handling processes, process flexibility improvement; common change management processes for economic and environmental success, and workflow management for economic process execution) and cross-functional work (including cross-company and cross-functional sustainable process alignment). • Support Enterprise Resource Planning system data interchange between supply chain members. • Use a product/process approach to avoid un-necessary steps that do not support sustainability efforts. • Use a central location for data management and storage to reduce data duplication and data inconsistences. • To mitigate the increased risks associated with SSCM, companies should utilize individual company monitoring, use generalized standards and certifications (such as ISO-14001). • Establish a central location for data management and storage, and use a common development platform. • Security concerns across informational boundaries increase with SCM; however, through trust–building procedures, collaboration between supply chain members improves.
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Recommendation: Coordinated, Cross-functional Team • Require and support departmental cross-functional collaboration. • Must be supported by top management. • Define development team roles clearly. • Include globally-inclined sustainability experts. • Collaboration improves through sharing information which focuses the organization on common goals, sharing resources, communication, creating knowledge, using common procedures, trusting, and jointly making decisions. • Remove barriers that inhibit collaboration such as functional silos and silo thinking solely focused on economic development. • Adopt a product/process approach. • Encourage a resource-based view that reviews inter-firm resources towards increasing competitiveness. • Encourage cross-functional and cross-company environmental and social data provisioning. • Manage key sustainability resources. • Define and jointly control data management resources.
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Recommendation: Clear Product Vision • Develop a clear definition of products. • Integrate a seamless product delivery process for new product introduction. • Match market requirements and value stream objectives. • Develop a clear, defined, sustainability scope and targets that are operationalized. • Meet a minimum threshold of acceptable performance. • Use customized tools, databases, design for sustainability methods, and supply chain tools. • Respect sustainability issues in process definitions. • Define roles and responsibilities clearly. • Educate and encourage NPD designers in sustainability. • Build active knowledge networks. • Management needs to establish specific sustainability targets. • Balance program and project management toward a standardized sustainable product development process. • Address aesthetic design advantages, which is especially important for sustainable products. • Encourage use of Design for the Environment, design-oriented work for green operations, and green supply chain management. • Understand the entire lifecycle, the impact upon the environment at each of its stages, and incorporate product attributes and manufacturing processes into design. • Address remanufacturing design concerns, such as product/component durability, level of re-manufacturability of products, managing the highly unpredictable return stream, consumer preferences between new and re-manufactured products, and supply constraints. • Consider appropriate alignment of re-manufactured products to its associated reverse supply chain. • Address Extended Producer Responsibility issues associated with new product and its associated processes.
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