Improving the management of environmental requirements in clients/suppliers co-design process
Résumé
The integration of the environmental criteria in clients/suppliers co-design process becomes an important issue owing to the growing influence of suppliers’ design choices on the clients’ products. This issue is currently poorly integrated in such a design context because of the limited ability for low mature suppliers to provide the basic environmental information to the clients; and of the difficulty for clients to properly size requirements in accordance with to the suppliers’ expertise. The paper describes a proposed method called "Environmental specifications diagnosis method" which is being developed in order to improve the requirements management. This method aims firstly at increasing the companies’ awareness toward environmental issues by positioning companies regarding the current sectorial practices. Secondly, the method provides a support for the clarification of better tuned requirements regarding the suppliers’ expertise. The paper provides also results from a case study performed with an industrial of the French mechanical industry in order to test the method validity.