Keywords

1 Introduction

Experts are aware of the fact that remanufacturing allows to recover a big proportion of the resources, which were used to produce a product. The environmental and economic benefits of remanufacturing are, as follows:

  • It recovers a product to useful life at low cost (up to 85% of the weight of remanufactured products can be reused), thus reducing the price of the product (Ijomah et al. 2004; Sundin and Bras 2005),

  • it allows to reduce the raw materials and energy usage compared to primary production(Ijomah et al. 2004; Kerr and Ryan 2001),

  • it allows closing the materials loop and reducing landfilling (Seitz and Peattie 2004; Abbey et al. 2014).

Remanufacturing is often perceived as a key strategy to achieve goals of the sustainable development policy (e.g. Ijomah et al. 2004). When proofing the importance of remanufacturing for the sustainable development, the researcher mainly apply the life cycle design and the life cycle engineering approach. There is a research gap regarding the assessment of remanufacturing operational excellence, as far as sustainability issues are concerned. In the previous research we have elaborated qualitative (Golinska and Kübler 2014) and quantitative (Golinska et al. 2015a) method for maturity assessment regarding sustainable usage of resources in a remanufacturing process. We defined three sustainable maturity levels. The assumption was made that small and medium sized remanufacturers (RSMEs) want to perform their operations and used their resources in the most efficient way, regarding economics, environmental and social aspects. Companies can achieve the maturity level, as follows (Golinska et al. 2015a):

  • class k = 1 (in green)—there is an acceptable level of sustainability of remanufacturing operations and no improvement actions are needed;

  • class k = 2 (in yellow)—there is a conditionally acceptable level of sustainability of remanufacturing operations, which requires corrective actions, as soon as it is economically and organizationally possible;

  • class k = 3 (in red)—there is an unacceptable level of sustainability of remanufacturing operations, which requires corrective actions.

The designed by the authors roadmap provides the guidelines on how to improve the current level of maturity regarding the sustainable usage of resources in remanufacturing operations. It helps to identify the area of operations which need improvements. In the next sections we present the process of creating the roadmap and its application potential.

2 Methodology

The roadmap was developed based on the data collected from small and medium sized Polish automotive parts remanufacturers. The aim was to first identify the drivers and facilitators which help the companies to improve their operations with regard to the sustainability. The roadmap is aiming also to provide some action plan towards implementation of necessary measures.

Roadmap is a useful tool, which is used to capture and communicate the outputs from the strategic planning process towards their implementation (Holmes et al. 2004). Technological roadmap presents the relationship between the market, products and technology parameters and identifies the objectives related to the required effort (Kappel 2001). Phaal et al. (2004) identified 8 purposes for preparing roadmaps:

  • Product planning—where roadmaps are used to link planned technology and product development,

  • Service/capability planning—where roadmaps focus on how technology supports organizational capabilities. It is mostly used in service–based enterprises,

  • Strategic planning—where roadmaps are used to support evaluation of different opportunities and threats,

  • Long-range planning—where roadmaps are elaborated at sectorial or national level and act as an radar to discover disruptive technologies and markets,

  • Knowledge asset planning—where roadmap links the skills, technologies and competencies required to meet future markets demand,

  • Programme planning—where roadmap focuses on implementation of general strategy to particular project development, it shows relationships between technology development and project’s milestones,

  • Process planning—where roadmap supports new product development by incorporating both technical and commercial aspects,

  • Integration planning—this type roadmap focuses on integration and evolution of technology shows how different technologies can be combined to form new technology or system.

In order to create a technology roadmap the two basic dimensions need to be defined, as follows (Phaal et al. 2004): timeframes and amount of layers. The timeframe depends on the industry. For example in case of industries where the technology and market conditions are changing in very short cycles (e.g. electronics), there is no point in building roadmap for 10 years. Phaal and Muller (2009) recommend five main timeframes:

  • The past—in this perspective it can be determined which events and factors have led to the current situation. It can be learning point for future actions.

  • A short time horizon (now)—this is usually a one year horizon. This is a very important part of the map as it will be converted into real plans and activities, which will influence the future.

  • The medium time horizon (plans)—the period between 1 and 3 years (usually), combined with the strategic plan, featuring the main directions and actions affecting the plans and decisions in the short term.

  • A long-term perspective (future)—usually a period of between 3 and 10 years, a combination between the average time horizon and the vision and aspirations of the organization. In this horizon should be identified uncertainties and future scenarios, technological changes, the market and the market environment should be identified in order to establish a mechanism radar that can detect and assess certain phenomena that affect current decisions.

  • The vision—it is long-time aspirations of the organization, including the definition of the mission.

The layers of the proposed system must be customized and suited to the analysis of the specific organization and problem. The first stage of work on the map is to define the layers and sublayers. Characteristics of the layers is presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Characteristics of layers of technology roadmap
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The multi-layer roadmap is presented in Fig. 1. The top layer relates trends and economic, environmental, social drivers with the goal of the roadmap. The middle layer is focused on mechanism through which goals are achieved, like: products, services, performance, requirements, operations (Phaal et al. 2005). The last layer presents resources which are needed to achieve the defined goal.

Fig. 1
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Multi-layer scheme roadmap. Own study based on Phaal and Muller (2009), Phaal et al. (2005)

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The literature review has showed that in case of remanufacturing the road map is applied very seldom. The search through databases: Science Direct, Business Source Premier and Google scholar databases were used with criterion “remanufacturing” + “roadmaps” and “roadmapping in remanufacturing”, showed very limited results. We grouped the relevant papers into four categories:

  • Technology roadmaps for sustainable manufacturing (remanufacturing included marginally) (Mishima and Umeda 2012; Seliger et al. 2008; Valkokari et al. 2014; IMS2020 2010)

  • Technology roadmaps for sustainable supply chain (remanufacturing included marginally) (Glenn et al. 2005; Dev and Shankar 2015)

  • Technology roadmaps for end-of-life management (Cheung et al. 2015; Wang and Cheng 2013; Juehling et al. 2010)

  • Technology roadmaps for design for remanufacturing (Cunha et al. 2011).

The most relevant to our research is the paper of Cunha et al. (2011). The authors applied T-Plan methodology to elaborate technology roadmap in order to identify how to improve the remanufacturing of production equipment, and to develop the new technologies to satisfy the market drivers.

Based on the findings from literature review we decided to also applied the T-plan roadmapping approach. The main advantage of the T-plan is its simplicity, and ability to be used for strategic and tactical planning.

The T-plan methodology recommends to make 4 workshops on: (1) market, (2) product, (3) technology and (4) roadmapping through linking technology resources to the future market opportunities and marking the existing gaps (Phaal et al. 2004).

Our aim was to developed the roadmaps which to guide RSMEs through decision-making process to improve usage of resources in the remanufacturing operations (with focus on automotive parts remanufacturing). We also aimed to link the roadmapinkg with the concepts of the maturity level of sustainable resource utilization. For these reasons we have modified the initial T-plan method as presented in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2
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Research methodology

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In the first workshop (W1), as suggested by Phall et al. (2004) were identified the market drivers, which showed market trends. The second workshop (W2) aimed to identify the links between indicators which were used to described the maturity level of resources utilization (SISR—Sustainability Indicators System for Remanufacturing) and the market drivers. The third workshop (W3) focused on identification of the necessary resources and actions that affected the indicators values. The fourth workshop (W4) aimed to visualize the relationship between the effects of previous workshops, and to show the holistic perspective including the time dimension. The results of the each workshop are discussed in the next section.

3 The Development of the Technology Roadmap for Remanufacturing

3.1 Market Workshop

The main goal of the Market Workshop (W1) was to identify which markets trends are most influential and are driving the development of more sustainable remanufacturing operations in Poland. The basic characteristic of the first workshop is presented in Table 2.

Table 2 Characteristic of the workshop W1
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T-Plan methodology recommends a set of tools to perform market drivers analysis. We decided to use common tool for strategic analysis, which was the Porter’s five forces analysis. In order to find the drivers which were relevant in the context of sustainability, we examined the dimensions, as follows: suppliers, buyers, substitutes, competitive rivalry, market conditions for potential new entry (as presented in Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
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Porter’s model

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In the next stage of the analysis the designated drivers from the Porter’s model were assessed. Each driver (di) was analyzed from the perspective of its importance level (z) (Table 3). The importance level (z) was evaluated on simple scale, as follows: z = 1—low impact, z = 2—moderate impact, z = 3—high impact.

Table 3 Identification of drivers with the use of Porter’s five forces analysis
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For the further analysis only drivers with the importance level z = 3 were taken into consideration.

3.2 Indicators Workshop

In roadmapping the common second step is to assess the influence of the identified markets drivers (from W1) on the product, process or service. In case of our roadmap the second workshop was dedicated to identify the sensitivity levels of the sustainability indicators, which we developed in the previous research. We used so called SISR (Sustainability Indicators System for Remanufacturing). The system is described in detailed in the Chapter Determining the Importance of the Criteria for Assessment of Sustainability in Remanufacturing Companies of this book. These indicators are designed to evaluate the resource utilization of a company taking into consideration 3 dimensions of sustainability. The definitions of each indicator is also presented in work of Golinska et al. (2015a). The basic characteristic of the workshop W2 is presented in Table 4.

Table 4 Characteristic of the workshop W2
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We made assumption that companies use their resources efficiently and in more sustainable way when they achieve higher level of remanufacturing process maturity (Golinska and Kübler 2014). The company maturity level assessment results from the value of the 15 indicators in SISR. We created the matrix of influence (see Table 5) to find out which indicators values are most sensitive to changes of the most important market drivers (from W1). Every participant of the workshops W2 graded each factor with the following scale:

Table 5 Evaluation of the impact of the drivers on the indicators SISR
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  • i = 0—no effect;

  • i = 1—low impact;

  • i = 2—moderate impact;

  • i = 3—large impact;

  • i = 4—a very big impact.

The summary of the assessment process is presented in Table 5. In order to identify the most sensitive indicators to changes in the market driver the results were normalized by scaling between 0 and 1. The most sensitive (results over 0.75) are indicators: Overall out of stock (OOS), Employment, Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and Material recovery rate (MRR). This findings corresponds with the results of our previous survey on group of over 40 RSMEs in automotive sector in Poland (see Golinska et al. 2015b). The majority of respondents there stated (87.5%) that they struggle to reach lot size bigger 1 piece. The very high variety of products variants make impossible to automate most of the operations in the remanufacturing process. The manual operations required advanced technical skills of employees. The respondents were complaining about the difficulty to find suitable employees because of the demographics trends and also shift on the job market towards service and high-tech industries. Lack of economy of scale also negatively influence the overall equipment effectiveness. The respondents also stated that the constant flow of cheap automotive parts from emerging markets (e.g. China) negatively influence the availability of cores for remanufacturing (impact on OOS value).

The sensitivity level analysis shows which indicators are most exposed to change their values when the market conditions might change. For this reason they should be monitored more carefully. The actions taken in case of the positive change of the market conditions, should result in the improvement of the maturity level of the remanufacturing process and more efficient use of resources.

3.3 Resources Workshop

In T-plan methodology usually the third Workshop (W3) focused on technology. In case of our roadmap the focus was placed on more sustainable utilization of resources. During W3 we reviewed the results from the market and indictors workshops. After the brainstorming session on how resources can be used more sustainable in remanufacturing process we created a list of potential actions which might be taken to improve the values of the SISR in order to achieve a higher level of remanufacturing process maturity. We made classification of the activities according to their impact on sustainability indicators. Finally we were able to identify the most influential actions for increasing maturity level of sustainable recourse utilization. The basic characteristic of the workshop is presented in Table 6.

Table 6 Characteristic of the workshop W3
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The resources used in the remanufacturing process in small and medium sized enterprises were divided into four categories: materials, information, employee, machines and tools.

During the brainstorming sessions we created list of the 64 actions which contributing to the more sustainable resources utilization in remanufacturing process. Then they were allocated to subcategories, depending whether they might focus on improving availability, standardization or effectiveness of the resources (see Table 7). The list of actions is presented in Table 8.

Table 7 Categorization of improvement actions
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Table 8 Identified actions and their classification
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The distribution of the improvement actions between the subcategories is presented Fig. 4.

Fig. 4
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Sectional activity analysis

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In case of resources, like materials and information most of the suggested improvements actions focused on standardization. The remanufacturing process in small and medium sized enterprises is “difficult to standardize partly due to the variability of components parts, products and processes” (Guidat et al. 2015). The Polish small remanufacturers suffer from very high variability of products variants, which influence the profitability of their operations and limits the application of more efficient organization and resources utilization (Golinska et al. 2015b). The standardization of operations, the information exchange and work routines help to reach better utilization level of resources.

In the case of human resources most of the actions (over 60%) focus on improving the effectiveness by creating more friendly and safe work environment.

The actions which focus on improvements of usage of Machines and Tools are aiming on improving of the ecological effectiveness. However about 30% of proposed actions also include introduction of standardization procedures.

After the actions were linked with appropriate resources then we ranked the impact of each action on each indicator from SISR (influence matrix). The Influence matrix is presented in Table 9. The numbering of the actions respond to those presented in Table 8, and numbering of the indicators responds to those presented in Table 5. At the intersection of the column (indicators) and line (action) is analyzed the impact of the actions on the indicators and are presented the evaluation according to the previously described scale (i = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4}). The results (last column) were normalized by scaling between 0 and 1 to facilitate comparisons of the scores. In the result there is obtained the answer for the previous question about the most desirable actions which have the greatest impact on sustainability indicators.

Table 9 Influence matrix: activity—indicators
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Authors divided all actions into 7 classes according to the normalized results (Table 10).

Table 10 Class intervals for actions
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Class boundaries were estimated with the use of the statistics method. Authors made calculations with the different class number from 3 till 7. The best results were achieved when dividing actions into 7 classes. The analysis showed that there were 13 actions, which had a high impact on the SISR.

These were the actions no: 5, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 23, 24, 25, 26, 43, 45, 47, which accounts for about 20% of all relevant activities. There can be applied Pareto rule that 20% of all actions may cause 80% effect in sustainability improvement.

It can be assumed with high probability that when a company takes such actions, it will improve the SISR indicators values to such an extent that it would reach a higher maturity level of a remanufacturing process in terms of sustainability and would benefit from market-based drivers.

3.4 Charting Workshop

During the last workshop we reviewed the results from previous workshops. Then we focused on the layers definition and determination of the relations between market drivers and SISR. In the next step the actions were linked to the indicators. All the links were visualized in the roadmap The basic characteristic of the workshop W4 is presented in Table 11.

Table 11 Characteristic of the workshop W4
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The prepared roadmap aims to help companies to implement actions which will result in more sustainable resources utilization in RSMEs and operations higher maturity level. According to the presented methodology a company has a long road to achieve that target. Firstly, a company has to know how do the market drivers influence the indicators (SISR). Moreover the resources should be identify (what is available, what is the resources’ quality). In the result company is able to select proper set of actions leading to higher resources utilization (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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Concept of the technology roadmap for remanufacturing

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In Fig. 6 are presented the layers, which were identified in the previous workshops, namely: market drivers, indicators, resources. The next step was to establish links between layers. The result of the linking layers in the roadmap is illustrated in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6
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Roadmap

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In the proposed approach the relevant market drivers (M1–M13) have a direct impact on indicators (i) (PULL). The middle layer contained indicators, which are affected by the resources (PUSH).

Resources are divided into four groups including: information (I), employees (E), machines (M), tools and material (MT). In each appropriate activities according to the formula:

$$ a_{z}^{y} $$
(1)

where

  • y—resource group, y∈{i (information); e (employees), mt (machines & tools), m (material)},

  • z—number of activity in the resource group.

By taking appropriate measures the company can improve the value of the indicators. Map shows the relationship and direction of influence between the resources and indicators.

4 Conclusions

The aim of the chapter was to present the process of elaboration of the roadmap for improving the resources utilization in the remanufacturing operations. In the process of the roadmap construction were identified the relations among the market drivers, process indicators and resources in the RSMEs. The map provides a decision support for small and medium sized enterprises in the remanufacturing sector. It visualizes the relations between actions which might be taken and their effects on resources utilization in long term perspective. It presents the actions which can be taken in order to achieve a higher level of maturity in the remanufacturing process.

The study has some limitations. The proposed actions are rather general. Due the fact that each company can be initially at different levels of maturity of remanufacturing process in terms of sustainable resources utilization, therefore timeframe was not included in this roadmap. The chapter rather provides a framework and guidelines for detailed roadmap elaboration in a RSME.