Page 29 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

8 Cha pte r O n e

management systems, analogous to the ISO 9000 series for quality
management systems. Many government agencies, notably in the
European Union, were taking aggressive steps to assure that manu-
facturers are responsible for recovery of products and mate rials at
the end of their useful lives. At the same time, there was a growing
voluntary commitment on the part of major manufacturing firms
to assure environmental responsibility for both their internal oper-
ations and their sup pliers. This led to the flourishing of consortia
such as the Global Environmental Manage ment Initiative and the
World Business Council for Sustainable Development, as well as
government-sponsored programs such as ENERGY STAR. All of
these historic changes are described in Chapter 3.
DFE can be seen as a conceptual crossroads between two major
thrusts that began in the 1980s and transform ed the nature of manu-
facturing throughout the world. As illustrated in Figure 1.3, these
two thrusts are enterprise integration and sustainable development.

Enterprise integration is the reengineering of business processes and
information systems to improve teamwork and coordination across
organizational bounda ries, thereby increasing the effectiveness of
the enterprise as a whole. The total quality management (TQM) move-
ment provided a strong motivation for enterprise integration, and
integrated product development (IPD) has been widely adopted as a
stra tegy for agile manufacturing, allowing companies to release higher-
quality products while reducing time to market. As described in
Chapter 5, IPD involves cross-functional design teams who con sider
the entire spectrum of quality factors, including safety, testability,
manufacturability, reliability, and maintainability, through out the

FIGURE 1.3 DFE is at the crossroads between enterprise integration and
sustainable development.