USE* have completed a detailed consultancy exercise considering the role of remanufacturing and ‘Design for Remanufacturing’ in partnership with a prestigious household name OEM client.

The traditional demand for Remanufacture is reactive and cost-focused, substituting less costly remanufactured for new in the aftermarket cycle. However, as identified in such groundbreaking publications as the Stern Review, ‘Design for Remanufacture’ (DfRM) is actually the key means for manufacturing businesses to deliver a more sustainable future and to effectively deal with the towering problem of escalating commodity costs.

DfRM must therefore be a critical aspect of any OEM’s forward-looking strategy. Looking at our customer’s business processes, USE* identified a combination of impelling and impeding forces that are driving our customer’s business towards or slowing its progress towards sustainable engineering practices in the future. From this we were able to develop a ‘roadmap’ of short and medium term actions that would allow DfRM to transform our customer’s business in the future.

This exercise has been key for both our customer and for USE*. For our customer areas where improvement is needed, and the reasons why, have been clearly identified, linking internal activities where previously strategic benefits through collaboration would perhaps have not been perceived. For USE*, an effective consulting tool has been developed applicable to almost any manufacturer who recognises the need to move to an environmentally sustainable business model going forward.