Road transports face increasing societal challenges with respect to emissions, safety, and traffic congestion, as well as business challenges. Truck automation, e.g. self-driving trucks may be utilized to address some of these issues. Autonomous transport vehicles may be characterized as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). A drawback is that CPS significantly increase technical complexity and thus introduce new challenges to system architecting. A product architecture is the interrelation between physical components and their function, i.e. their purpose. Product architectures can be categorized as being modular or integral. The main purpose of a modular architecture is to enable external variety and at the same time internal commonality. Products with a modular architecture are configured from predesigned building blocks, i.e. modules. A stable module, which is a carrier of main function(s) has standardized interfaces, is configured for company-specific reasons, which means it supports a company-specific (business) strategy. In this thesis, the present state at the heavy vehicle manufacturer Scania, concerning product architecting, modularization, product description and configuration is investigated. Moreover, a new clustering based method for product modularization that integrates product complexity and company business strategies is proposed. The method is logically verified with multiple industrial cases, where the architecture of a heavy truck driveline is used as a test bench. The driveline contains synergistic configurations of mechanical, electrical and software technologies that are constituents of an automated  and/or semi-autonomous system, i.e. the driveline may be characterized as a CPS. The architecture is analyzed both from technical complexity and business strategy point of view.  The presented research indicates that a structured methodology which supports the development of the product architecture is needed at Scania, to enable control of the increasing technical complexity in the Cyber-Physical Systems. Finally, configuration rules are identified to be highly important in order to successfully realize a modular product architecture. A drawback with this approach is that the solution space becomes hard to identify, therefore a complete and flexible product description methodology is essential. The results from the case studies indicate that clustering of a Product Architecture DSM may result in a modular architecture with significantly reduced complexity, but with clusters that contain conflicting module drivers. It is also identified that the new modularization methodology is capable of identifying and proposing reasonable module candidates that address product complexity as well as company-specific strategies. Furthermore, several case studies show that the proposed method can be used for analyzing and finding the explicit and/or implicit, technical as well as strategic, reasons behind the architecture of an existing product.

How to make teams Flexible without sacrificing their Efficiency? This is an important question especially in the context of Product Development (PD) organizations, as they operate in a dynamic environment and are highly team-driven. The answer to this question lies in understanding the role of all individual constituents that contribute to building Team Flexibility. One such constituent is teams’ Structure. This research work examines the role of Structural antecedents in building Flexibility into PD teams. This study considers PD Team Flexibility as a means to deal with both change and uncertainty. A conceptual framework of structural practices was developed to reflect this perspective. An ex-post facto survey based research design with Convenient Sampling technique was adopted for this study. Data was collected from 108 PD teams (both public and private sector) about their current structural practices, complexity of product development activity and their performances. The information collected from these teams was analysed to determine the key factors which would result in building Team Flexibility. The analysis of the data resulted in producing five antecedents. The results from the study suggest that, in general, designing structural practices centered on team ‘Participation and Control’ and ‘Time Bound Formalization’ antecedents helps in simultaneously achieving high Flexibility and Efficiency. The result also hints at the possibility of Large teams achieving both Flexibility and Efficiency with the introduction of appropriate practices designed around these antecedents. A caveat to the above claim is that complexity of PD activity would moderate the effectiveness of these antecedents and hence should be borne in mind before implementing them.

Product customisation has always been a regular practice as a form of self or group identification. Previous studies have demonstrated that when investing time and effort to customise a product, an emotional attachment to that product develops. Since the 1980s, new technologies in design, manufacturing and communications have facilitated customisation practices for mass manufacturers as well as for individual consumers. For example, computer algorithms can now automate customisation (i.e. individualise), meaning that the investment of time and effort can be significantly lower than in other customisation processes. Such novel automated practices have, however, not considered the effects on emotional attachment to products, which occurs when the consumer personally engages in the process. This research investigates individualisation as a form of customisation by looking at the relationship between an individualised product and the consumers’ attribution of value and emotional attachment to the end result. This was achieved through a mixed methods approach: following a literature review, in-depth interviews, observation and experiments were carried out. Four pilot studies were conducted, involving 42 respondents (designers, company directors, and consumers). The main study engaged a further 44 respondents, profiled as one of two types of consumers depending on their critical engagement with customisation processes, namely Active Consumers (AC) that Passive Consumers (PC). Data was collected through five Action Research cycles and incorporated key features of Design-Based Research. It was then processed, coded and analysed using thematic analysis. This study makes contributions to knowledge in the area of product customisation and individualisation, as well as in the research methods developed, applied and refined over the four pilot iterations and in the main study. Results suggest that despite limiting freedom of choice, individualisation is a valuable approach to product customisation, particularly for PCs willing to relinquish part of the decision making to an automated process, in order to obtain a customised and unique design. ACs, on the other hand, value their freedom to customise their own products and see individualisation as a limitation to the customisation experience and as a hindrance to developing emotional attachment to the product. These findings have the potential to inform entrepreneurs’ and designers’ decisions to better understand and exploit the benefits associated to individualisation processes. Offering specific consumer groups opportunities to engage with the individualisation process can trigger a strong emotional product attachment and potentially generate new business opportunities.

Le système PLM est l’un des outils stratégiques de l’entreprise. Ces systèmes sont sujets à des changements récurrents dans l’entreprise. Les évolutions organisationnelles, le changement de l’offre produit ou encore le remplacement de logiciels PLM peuvent déclencher l’évolution du système d’information PLM. Une des structures les plus importantes dans les systèmes PLM est le modèle du produit, autour duquel s’articule les informations et processus. C’est autour du modèle produit que se concentrent nos recherches. Les causes d’évolution des modèles produits sont des éléments signifiants qui différencient les étapes de la démarche à suivre. Les méthodes d’IDM sont utilisées afin de formaliser la transformation des modèles. En plus, cette démarche bénéfice d’un cadre de similarité spécialement développé pour la configuration de produit. Un exemple industriel est illustré et résolu en appliquant cette démarche. Il s’agit de l’évolution d’un système gérant les modèles spécifiques de produit vers un système qui est capable de construire et d’utiliser les modèles génériques de produit. Un outil informatique support à nos travaux est développé dans le cadre d'Eclipse. / PLM systems are among the strategic components of enterprise’s information system architecture. These systems undergo frequent evolutions of enterprise. Organizational evolution or product offer variation as well as PLM application replacement may launch PLM systems’ evolution.One of the important structures in PLM systems is the product configuration, which organize and structure all product’s information and processes. Our research activities concern product model evolution. Reasons of product model evolution specify the appropriate methodology and necessary steps in order to handle it. MDE methods are used to formalize the model transformation process.Moreover, our methodology contains a specific similarity framework dedicated to product configuration. An industrial example was illustrated and resolved by this methodology. The problematic of this example is the migration of a system which manage only specific product configuration to a new system that is capable to construct and use generic models of product.

Today's global economy requires many organizations to co-ordinate work across a variety of intra and inter-organizational boundaries (Armstrong & Cole, 1995; Lipnack & Stamps, 1997). Global competition, re-engineered product life cycles, mass customization, and the increased need to respond quickly to customer needs are just some of the more pronounced trends currently driving organizational change (Grenier & Metes, 1995; Miles & Snow, 1986; Miles & Snow, 1992). An organizations growth and profitability is largely due to the strategies of globalization. Firms developing products with global applications must build competencies to connect and leverage knowledge on a worldwide basis (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1998). In several industries product development is a crucial ingredient and therefore factors such as cost of development, cycle time and increased productivity are key drivers for market share and profitability. Product development is an expensive process particularly in the engineering and technology intensive segments. Technological advances have enabled many companies to assemble teams of employees from across the country or around the world into global teams to solve complex organizational problems (Lipnack and Stamps, 1997). Such teams are sometimes temporary, culturally diverse, geographically dispersed, and electronically communicating collections of individuals (Kristof, Brown, Sims, and Smith, 1995). These teams allow organizations to increase efficiency and effectiveness by tapping the knowledge, skills, and expertise of employees around the globe, increasing opportunities for information or knowledge exchange through expanded social networks (Wellman 1996). A large amount of investment is spent in human resources and hence ways to optimize the spending by leveraging global resources, directly helps the bottom line (Govindarajan & Gupta 2001). Models that could be used to understand better team development and effectiveness have been limited to those based on the traditional colocated group perspective. Theory development and empirical research are needed to help managers better understand and respond to the challenges that global teams face (Furst, Blackburn & Rosen, 1999). A literature review conducted found though team effectiveness has been fairly well researched the extension of the topic and as applied to global teams remains a gap. This study attempts to understand team effectiveness and its relevance when applied to a global team in a product development environment. The study involves developing a suitable model and understanding the causal relationships between the identified factors and explains the model based on the findings. Review of Literature The study reviewed a vast amount of literature relating to teams and small workgroups and summarized findings under; Team Definition, Team Types and Nature, Team Composition, Task Design, Team Development, Team Processes, Organizational Context and Global Teams. The literary review suggests that though research is steadily increasing, empirical studies on performance and effectiveness are limited. There has been very few studies on effectiveness as applied to global teams. Literature review on the subject of global teams, suggests that these teams, face even greater challenges because of their geographical separation, diverse cultures, and language. The study identified factors as applicable to global team effectiveness based on previous studies and calibrates them with findings in general team and workgroup study. The study considers Task design, Team composition, and Organizational context factors and attempts to empirically determine causal relationships with Team Processes and Team Effectiveness. Objectives and Methodology The objectives of the study are as follows: 1 To develop and validate a conceptual model that explains global team effectiveness in a product development environment. 2 To establish relationship between team design, team composition, knowledge management context and senior management context towards global team effectiveness in a product development environment. 3 To illustrate the application of the validated model and relationships for developing interventions to enhance effectiveness in a product development environment through a qualitative case study. The methodology adopted was to study contemporary team effectiveness models from literature and get an understanding of the key variables and factors that influence effectiveness. Next, based on prior studies on global teams, a model was developed using an established effectiveness model and extended it to global teams. The main study comprised of analyzing responses from 376 participants from 64 projects working together as global teams. The conceptual model developed consists of two key factors measuring effectiveness namely; Product Development Effectiveness and Team Process Effectiveness. The enabling factors, that are called as ‘global factors’ in the study that influence effectiveness in the model are; Team Design and Composition, Senior Management Context and Knowledge Management Context. Measures defining each factor were developed, refined and checked for reliability and validity. The factor analysis conducted suggested that Product development effectiveness variables include; Schedule compliance, Functional completeness, Product Quality, Cost compliance and Innovative Problem solving. Team Process effectiveness includes; Internal motivation in the team, Looking forward to team challenges, Willingness to share Knowledge, Conflict resolution, Openness to Learning and Quality team interaction. Similarly, factor analysis suggests Task design and team composition be combined as Team Design and Composition. The variables included are; Clear Goals, Well defined output or deliverable, Use of Judgment, Adequate skill sets (Technical, Functional, Program Management and Diversity) and Right size. Knowledge Management Context variables following factor analysis are; Knowledge management practice, Perceived importance of knowledge management, adequate infrastructure and Existent reward system. Senior Management context variables are; Global Senior management support, Management review support and Easy information flow. In order to achieve the objectives of the study a detailed Structural Equation Modeling using Partial Least Squares method was conducted. The measurement model and structural model was assessed, path coefficients studied, moderating effects studied and model evaluated for goodness of fit. In addition, an in depth case study is conducted and the model is applied in a practical scenario. Results and Discussion The study suggests the importance of global teams in a product development environment. This is particularly so as distance, time, culture and technology interface make it all the more important for global teams to have means of measuring effectiveness. It is also necessary to have an understanding of the enabling factors aiding effectiveness. The study suggests a model for measuring effectiveness in global teams involved in product development as; Meeting milestones and timely delivery of the output, Meeting product functional and technical requirements, Quality of output delivered, Cost and budget targets and Innovative problem solving are typical measurements of effectiveness. The model encourages using Team Process Effectiveness as a measure and suggests it has a moderating influence it has on Product Development Effectiveness. The Team Process Effectiveness measures are; Internal motivation amongst members within the team, Identifying if the team looks forward to challenges, Willingness to share knowledge with each other, Resolving conflicts within the team in a positive manner, Openness to learning and Quality team interaction. The model developed indicates that all paths defined and relationships are positive and the model is structurally valid. As hypothesized, factors, Team Design and Composition, Knowledge Management Context and Senior Management Context has significant relationship with Team Process Effectiveness. Further, Team Process Effectiveness has positive causal relationship with Product Development Effectiveness. Knowledge Management Context and Senior Management Context have a significant and positive relationship with Team Process Effectiveness. The study confirms the moderating influence Team Process Effectiveness has on Team Design and Composition, Senior Management context, Knowledge Management Context with Product Development Effectiveness. The in depth case study on a department of 75 members of product development global teams provided the insight into the empirical analysis, strengthened it and helped understand several other aspects of global teams. Conclusion The study provided an in-depth understanding of global team effectiveness by reviewing literature and identifying variables that influence global teams in a product development environment. A model was developed, empirically validated and tested. The model includes effectiveness factors and enabling factors and relationship between factors have been explained. A case study spanning a period of five years on a global team involved in product development was conducted and the model applied in practice. This study suggests that the model can be used by organizations and practicing managers for understanding, developing and leading global teams involved in product development.

Successful product development has been a fundamental part of many of today's companies and their continued prosperity depends on continuing to develop new products in the future. There are many models of product development. The two most common classes of development are market pull (MP) and technology push (TP). TP product development differs from MP in that the development begins with a specified technology rather than a specified customer. Because TP development is generally considered more difficult and challenging, most of the product development research has focused on MP development and many researchers and practitioners favor MP development over TP development. However, successful TP development has been shown to be a source of innovation that cannot be realized through MP development and is performed by many companies. The research in this thesis focuses on developing a comprehensive TP model to guide product developers on how to implement TP development successfully. This new TP model is developed by comparing recently published TP models to published best practices of TP development and known deficiencies of TP models. The comprehensive TP model makes improvements to the existing TP models through the addition of processes and tools that overcome deficiencies and incorporate best practices. The new comprehensive TP model includes elements of existing generic MP models, a "Technology Application Selection" (TAS) process and several new processes and tools associated with prototypes and network groups. Some of the new processes and tools are demonstrated through a case example. The comprehensive TP model provides product developers with the necessary step-by-step guide to TP product development. The model effectively deals with deficiencies of previous TP models, is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed to guide product developers, is complimentary and consistent to existing design processes and terms, is applicable to most TP product development projects, and is useful and repeatable in making product development decisions.

The traditional pen-paper sketching is extensively used in the early stages of product design as it supports creative exploration of product concepts and provides a fluidic mode for the expression of ideas. The Computer Aided Design (CAD) models support the later stages of design and manufacturing process. Faithful conversion of the designer’s ideas from concept sketches to the CAD models is a skill intensive and time consuming exercise which reduces the overall productivity of the organization. Providing computer based support can help the designer, in several ways, by reducing demand on the skill and allow focusing more on creative exploration of the concepts. Towards that, the thesis presents methodologies to understand the product concept sketches, support cognitive activities like perceiving the composition and behaviour, and create and interact with the sketches, directly in 3D. To begin with, traditional 2D sketches of product concepts are studied mainly to explores the psychological (cognitive) and physiological (musculoskeletal) activities of the designer in the context of the product being designed. A sketching application is created for capturing the sketches created using a tablet in digitized form. The captured data is analyzed based on the identified parameters. A grouping methodology is devised to group the stroke based on the observations which are akin to Gestalt laws of perceptual organization. This functional grouping or segmentation is used to identify the mental model of the product concept and the design rationale behind it. In concept sketches, annotations carry information like behaviour, functionality and usage. These wishful declarations need to be verified through simulation! To simulate the behavior of the components identified by the functional segmentation method, a kinematic model is defined where the designers interactively describe the constituents like joints, fixed links, inputs, etc. The interactive simulation changes the underlying kinematic model and makes the sketches to move to show the behavior. This system also provides methods to verify boundary constraints and allows creating patterns. Traditional 2D sketching suffers from several deficiencies. To overcome these, a novel direct 3D sketching methodology is proposed with stereo vision and haptic feedback. Different types of strokes creations like curves, strips and sweep surfaces, directly in 3D space, are demonstrated. Further, to provide control over stroke creation process, visual and haptic feedbacks are studied. Haptic rendering schemes for stroke generation are explored based on mechanics of sketching. Using the curve generation methods, surface generation schemes are devised. Mainly two types of schemes are explored (a) sweep surface and (b) Hatching surfaces. To support constrained concept exploration, two types of haptic constraints are modeled and their application is demonstrated in constraining a sketch within a boundary and outside a boundary. Motion constraints are implemented by simulating the behaviour of identified components’ motions. Two types of motion are implemented (a) Linear translation and (b) Rotation about an axis. Finally, a sketch based distributed collaboration method is presented to enable design interaction in the context of global product development. Several issues related to the realization of a sketch based collaborative conceptual design system are explored and, one such instance is demonstrated through experiments.

The rapidly evolving global market scenario raised multiple challenges for an organization such as: change in customer needs and lifestyle, increased competition, compulsion to enter into new markets, pursue to innovate and so on, which raises an additional challenge for organization to sustain and succeed. In order to meet these multiple challenges, continuous New Product Development (NPD) turns out to be one of the essential tasks for any organization to improve market share, profitability and to succeed. In this scenario, a new product portfolio with best mix of new projects that ensures strategic alignment, balance of portfolio and improves organizations’ potential gain is compulsion. However, From the literature, it is observed that, ‘As nearly half of initial NPD ideas occur informally or without a specific goal, even a best performing organization requires a major improvement in the decision making process of Project Evaluation and Selection (PES)’. This emphasizes the significance of decision on Project Evaluation and Selection (PES) of NPD. Additionally, huge investments and resources need to be employed based on decision that is taken at PES phase of NPD. Thus PES turns out to be a crucial and essential phase of New Product Process (NPP). All these stated aspects of this challenging and crucial strategic decision of PES provoke for the requirement of an efficient management system and decision making model. In the literature the management system and decision making processes for formulation of portfolio is termed as “New Product Portfolio Management (NPPM)”. Though various researchers have been focusing on this particular issue of improving NPPM Performance, from the analysis of literature, to the best of our knowledge, it is observed that no one has identified or considered an exhaustive list of possible evaluative dimensions while taking the decision on PES of NPPM (PES-NPPM). This thesis makes an attempt to address this research gap, and the scope of this study is pertained to three sectors of manufacturing industry, namely, Automotive, Electronics and Machine Tools. Accordingly, the main objective of this thesis is “ In order to achieve this particular objective the following sub-objectives, methodologies, and analysis are carried out. For this purpose, first and foremost analysis of literature on PES is carried out. Accordingly, five evaluative dimensions are identified for PES-NPPM and they are: (i) Strategic Fit; (ii) Portfolio-Innovation Balance; (iii) Risk-Uncertainty Estimation; (iv) Cost-Revenue Estimation and (v) Optimized Resource Allocation. Furthermore, it is observed that, there is no study considering all the five evaluative dimensions simultaneously for PES-NPPM either to analyze their impact on performance of NPPM or to develop a decision making model. Thus, we are addressing a new problem configuration in the area of PES-NPPM. Additionally, though the requirements of multi-criteria models for PES-NPPM is discussed both in academic and practioners points of view, the real demonstration of the applicability of multi-criteria models are given a scant treatment in the literature. . By the end of the achieving this objective, we identified five distinct evaluative dimensions which are used in different combinations for PES-NPPM. Further, for measuring each of these five evaluative dimensions, we identified 23, 11, 15, 10, and 18 measurement variables respectively. Based on the evaluative dimensions considered in this study, a framework work is proposed for PES-NPPM. Due to the limitation of empirical evidences on considering the identified evaluative dimensions and respective measurement variables towards the proposed initial framework for PES-NPPM, another exploratory study: a case study method is carried out. In addition to the process of triangulation, the case study approach is carried out to understand (a) significance and nature of the identified measurement variables of all the five evaluative dimensions for PES-NPPM, and (b) real-life practices in decision making process of PES-NPPM and to identify the requirements of decision making tools. Accordingly, 12 case studies (4 each) from three manufacturing sectors, considered in this study, are conducted. Further, 12 case study reports are prepared and inferences are drawn. The inferences drawn are verified by conducting an individual brain-storming session with 3 academicians and 4 practitioners. The detailed analysis of the 12 case study reports endorsed the necessity of considering all the five identified evaluative dimensions in the proposed framework for PES-NPPM. In addition, the case study analysis revealed some of the variables originally considered for measuring the evaluative dimensions are not really the measurement variables, whereas those variables are expected to impact the decision making environment of PES-NPPM (or) NPPM Performance. Further those non-measurement variables are classified into (a) Characteristic Variables of PES-NPPM, and (b) Moderating variables for NPPM. Based on this, case study analysis identified 8 characteristic variables and 8 moderating variables. This specific observation resulted to analyze further the existing literature in order to identify if there exist any additional variables which impact decision making environment of PES-NPPM (or) NPPM Performance. Thus, from the analysis of literature and case study analysis 17 characteristic variable and 13 moderating variables are identified. Additionally, For this purpose, Partial Least Square – Path Modeling (PLS-PM) (or) regression analysis is conducted depending upon type of variables with 104 observations (representing 34, 39, and 31 observations of the three sectors respectively) to analyze the relationships between characteristic and moderating variables on decision-making environment of PES-NPPM and NPPM Performance respectively. From case study analysis, it is observed that the decision making tool required should provide: (a) ability to incorporate judgmental scores along with financial and other quantitative metrics, (b) ability to attain a balance of portfolio and consider interactions among project, and (c) ability to provide alternatives and rank the alternatives. In addition to the observation drawn from the case study analysis on the need of MCDM based tool(s), analysis of the literature is carried out to verify the same. As this problem scenario considers both quantitative and qualitative data for the development of a decision making tool, an appropriate technique/methodology needs to be employed. Based on analysis of literature and the case study reports, this study proposes an integrated Data Envelopment Analysis and Balanced Scorecard (DEA-BSC) model for individual PES. Further, the proposed DEA-BSC model is extended for evaluation of new product portfolio. In the process of formulation of new product portfolio, first, every new product project is evaluated with the proposed integrated DEA-BSC model. Second, an algorithm is designed to generate alternate portfolios with the selected set of efficient new product projects. Then, DEA-BSC model is employed to evaluate the generated portfolios. At this step, an accumulation functions are proposed which considers interactions among projects. These accumulation functions determine the overall input and output of the portfolio along with interactions involved. Accordingly, the proposed integrated DEA-BSC model for portfolio evaluation is expected to result in a balanced portfolio with profitable new product projects. In addition, the workability of the proposed integrated DEA-BSC model is demonstrated by developing a suitable numerical example. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is carried out on proposed DEA-BSC model to analyze the robustness of the results. In summary, this thesis examined a problem of decision making of NPPM. Further, this problem was retained with main focus on PES phase. Accordingly, the major contributions of this thesis are as follows: Identified an exhaustive lists of evaluative dimensions: (i) Strategic Fit; (ii) Portfolio-Innovation Balance; (iii) Risk-Uncertainty Estimation; (iv) Cost-Revenue Estimation and (v) Optimized Resource Allocation. Also identified the significance of these five dimensions in case of PES-NPPM. In addition, all the five evaluative dimensions are considered simultaneously for development of a multi criteria decision making tool for PES-NPPM. Identified the required measurement variables for each of the evaluative dimensions, considered in this study, that are essential for PES, and analyzed their influence on performance of NPPM. Identified and analyzed characteristic and moderating variables that influence decision making environment of PES-NPPM and performance of NPPM respectively. Identified the requirements of a decision making tool for PES-NPPM and developed an integrated DEA-BSC model for PES. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed integrated DEA-BSC model is considered to be the first hybrid model applied to PES-NPPM. Furthermore for implementing the proposed DEA-BSC model, an algorithm is proposed in this study and this is expected to assist decision maker for selecting the right set of projects for new product portfolio with higher development potential, profitability and minimize the associated risk. Identified possible project interactions caused due to external or internal factors and accordingly proposed an accumulation function to capture these interactions. Proposed an algorithm for formulation of new product portfolio and accordingly proposed a detail step-by-step procedure for implementation of the proposed integrated DEA-BSC model. Though this study analyzes the impact of characteristic variables on decision-making environment of PES-NPPM, we limit to link this impact to DEA-BSC Model. In this study, an attempt is made to capture the moderating effect on NPPM Performance, but this study limits to link this moderating effect in proposed DEA-BSC model. Finally, the validation of the workability of proposed DEA-BSC model is limited to the numerical example considered in the study and not to the real-life problems scenarios.

This thesis aims at developing a (dis/re)assembly oriented methodology towards product end-of-life. Particular focus in this thesis is on the circularity of furniture via design for (dis/re)assembly. The main motivation behind this study was the need for a method to evaluate the (dis/re)assembly options of furniture designs to be able to facilitate repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishing, or recycling. The study draws upon relevant theories and prior research on Circular product Design, Design for EoL, Design for Environment, and Design for (Dis)assembly of vehicles, electrical and elocronic equipments, whitegoods, as well as office furniture, though relatively limited. The proposed methodology determines major aspects of design for (dis/re)assembly to be taken in to consideration in the early stages of product development. It further provides a set of parameters that are relevant to cabinet type and upholstery furniture group. The study involves a variety of qualitative research methods that are embedded in an interactive research conduct with the engagement of different stakeholders that are charged with the task of product development at Ikea of Sweden (IoS), the collaborator of this study.  The proposed methodology is implemented on three selected furniture designs in a pilot study. The results of the study, above all, suggest that (dis/re)assemblability of a product is a strategic choice that needs to be made at early phases of product development, namely the design phase. Two particular features of the furniture groups, upon which this study focuses, emerges as factors having negative impact on the disassemblability of products: first, wooden frame sofas with respect to their complex structure and connectivity of componants and, second, permanent joints with respect to their destructive impact on the product. The study concludes that it is feasible to develop and implement a potentially comprehensible method to evaluate the ease of disassembly of furniture products and to design for disassembly. The proposed methodology in this study is a contribution to support product design for disassembly towards product circularity.

Previous research has suggested that the country of origin cue is important to consumers during their purchase decision making process; the cue is utilised as an indicator of product quality and thus has an effect on purchase decisions. However, country of origin research has been heavily criticised in terms of methodology and has tended to focus on durable, manufactured products such as automobiles, electronics and apparel. This research investigates whether consumers do utilise the country of origin cue during actual wine purchase decisions and whether consumer perceptions of wine will vary based upon the country from which it originates. In addition, this study also seeks to identify all of the product attributes which are utilised by wine purchasers, and the degree to which these attributes are important to them during the purchase decision process. Finally, the research seeks to understand the influence that individual consumer characteristics (i.e. demographic variables, product knowledge and product involvement) and usage situations will have upon attribute utilisation and importance. In order to examine these broad research questions, a structured survey was developed and administered to respondents in four countries immediately following an actual wine purchase. Analysis of the collected survey data revealed that consumers typically utilised only a small number of attributes during their purchase decisions, and that the attributes which were most frequently utilised were not necessarily the most important to wine consumers. The country of origin cue was the eighth most frequently utilised attribute and the fourth in terms of importance. The majority of consumers could accurately identify the country of origin of the wine they had just purchased and their perceptions of wines were found to vary based upon the country of origin. Individual consumer characteristics were found to have varying effects upon attribute utilisation and importance ratings. Three-quarters of all wine purchases were made to resolve just four usage situations, and these situations were found to moderate the origin of the wine that the consumer selected during their purchase decision. From a theoretical standpoint, this study supports the idea that consumers utilise only a small number of attributes during their decision making process, and that this number will increase as product knowledge and product involvement levels increase. The most important attributes for consumers were found to be intrinsic in nature. Country of origin theory has also been advanced by this study; consumers were found to hold stereotyped perceptions of wine based upon its national origin, and both the nationality and education level of the consumer were found to moderate the utilisation of the country of origin cue. Whilst earlier researchers had suggested that any home country bias may be product specific, this study suggests that it may actually be a product dimension specific phenomenon. The high reliability of the product involvement and subjective knowledge scales should also be of value to future consumer behaviour researchers. Similarly, the idea that the usage situation influenced which product was purchased, but not how it was selected, expands current knowledge. Practical implications arising from this study include the identification of the importance of having previously tried a wine; marketers could increase sales through the provision of wine tasting opportunities for consumers. The significant correlation between involvement and the frequency of wine consumption also provides wine producers with an opportunity to increase sales through initiatives which will increase consumer involvement with wine. The results indicate that the wine industry should focus on the production and marketing of wines which are suitable for consumption in the identified four dominant usage situations and should seek to increase consumption in dining situations in the US. Finally, promotional strategies linking New Zealand wines with high quality appear to have been successful, but these messages will need to be repeated in order to reinforce the positive consumer perceptions.