A successful (and safe!) third conference day,
cycling from PSS to PSS in Copenhagen city
centre.
Keratojector – a bio-inspired tool for improved
handling of corneal transplants during eye
surgery.
Two product architectures covering two market
segments. BA: Business area. Good, better best
are performance classes of products.
9th CIRP Industrial Product/Service-Systems Conference: IPSS2017
On 19-21 June, K&P welcomed 130 delegates
from 18 different countries to IPSS2017.
The first two days of the conference took place
at DTU, with four excellent keynote speeches, 72
article presentations and four special workshop
streams. All papers were made available from
the beginning of the conference as Golden Open
Access Procedia papers, via Elsevier.
The keynote speeches were delivered by three
eminent researchers and one distinguished
industry CEO, all in the field of product/servicesystems
(PSS). Prof. Arnold Tukker opened the
conference by relating PSS to Circular Economy
driving forces. The second keynote was delivered
by CEO Hans Ottosen, Danelec Marine, who delivered
an impressive example of how his business
is formed upon an embedded PSS strategy. Prof.
Tim Baines talked in his keynote about how companies
manage the servitisation process - the
transition from product to integrated PSS operations
modes. The final keynote, which closed the
conference’s second day, was delivered by Walter
Stahel, one of the forefathers of PSS. Walter
reflected on the conference’s academic content
and challenged us with thought-provoking ideas
towards how PSS can - or maybe cannot - contribute
to a more sustainable society.
The third day of the conference was organised
in a rather untraditional manner. As a complement
to the “sit and listen” style of the first two
days of the conference, the third day was spent
in Copenhagen city centre, where we explored
PSS solutions and businesses within the city.
Two groups carried out walking tours and the
other two cycled from company to company on
the Copenhagen Citybike, one of the newest PSS
solutions in the public space. A very good way
to put the theory to test and to reflect on our
research activities.
User-oriented and bio-inspired development of medical technology
Successful development of medical technology
requires a thorough understanding of the clinical
context where the technology will be used
and insight into advanced materials, production
technology, micro-mechanics and solution
principles. The context understanding is best
achieved through active participation in the
clinical work at hospitals together with doctors
and patients. In this way, working procedures
can be supported and experiences from existing
technology can be incorporated. An excellent
source of inspiration for new solutions is biology.
Nature has had billions of years to invent
delicate and optimized solutions to most of the
functional challenges experienced in medical
technology. In a recent project, Nicklas Werge
Svendsen developed a bioinspired tool for eye
surgeons. The tool will make it possible to reduce
operation time and pave the way to make
the operations more realistic in the setting of
developing countries. Eye disease is a major
problem in the less privileged part of the world,
where reduced vision can handicap people to a
degree where they are no longer an active part
of the work force but instead become a burden
to their families. In corneal diseases, the transparent
cornea in the front of the eye becomes
non-transparent, making the patient practically
blind. Corneal diseases are often solved by
transplantation, i.e. by replacing the innermost
layer of the endothelials cells in the cornea with
a donor transplant. However, as the cornea is
the main component of the eye’s refraction,
transplantations not only impede the diseases’
progression, the vision of the patient is also
restored to the initial level. The developed
tool will reduce the need for the eye surgeon
to prepare and clean the transplant and it also
functions as a transportation box that can keep
the living tissue in good condition. This makes
it possible to centralize the preparations of
the corneal transplants and distribute them to
remote hospitals. Presently, a proof-of-concept
model has been developed in dialogue with
Glostrup Hospital. The next step is to improve
the model and conduct clinical trials.
Product and Manufacturing architecture modelling
The K&P section has over the last 7 years studied
product and manufacturing architectures
in more than 200 industrial projects. In the
majority of projects, results show that there are
more product architectures than can be justified
from a market point of view. Several cases have
shown a factor two in manufacturing efficiency
difference, depending on which product
architecture is manufactured on a particular
production line.
When there are e.g. two times more product
architectures than can be justified from a market
point of view, it principally means that half
of the R&D resources are spent on developing
architectures that are not serving the market
in the best way. Seen from a purchasing and
manufacturing point of view, this means that in
principle 50% of parts are non-value creating.
The implication is that rationalization in purchase
is difficult and it lowers manufacturing
efficiency due to e.g. higher number of change
overs between products.
From a manufacturing operation point of view,
the consequence is that companies are more
complex and have higher costs than they should
have. From a development point of view, it
means that R&D resources could have been
spent on more profitable products.
Within MADE (Manufacturing Academy of Denmark),
automation has been studied. When the
number of architectures is too high, it makes
automation more difficult. It is unprofitable to
put e.g. robots on product architectures that
should never have been developed. Therefore,
product and manufacturing architectures have
to be developed in a coordinated, top down way.
Contact:
Tim McAloone, e-mail: tmca@dtu.dk
Contact:
Torben Anker Lenau, e-mail: lenau@mek.dtu.dk
Contact:
Niels Henrik Mortensen, e-mail: nhmo@mek.dtu.dk
Engineering Design and product development 27