ABSTRACT
In the past, besides companies are only required to develop and produce goods and services that are of consistently high quality, have shorter lead times, are less expensive but in a more flexible way. Environmental issues have become important particularly in product development (Partidario and Vergragt 2002), Environmental protection policies imposed by different countries make product development a very difficult and complicated task (Fawzi 2007). Firms are now developing environmental policies for their operating facilities, services and supply chain partners while trying to maintain consistency with new regulations. Many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) manufacture their products using materials and parts procured from various vendors. However, product development activities often exceed the boundary of one firm, the availability of information and resources are usually very low. Meanwhile, SMEs cannot afford spending too many of their resource on conforming to regulations, or else they would not have profitable products. Consequently, they generally have difficulties in handling environmental issues with their production activities (Leistner 1999). The objective of this paper is to propose a model that makes use of collaborative product design and manufacturing information
1 INTRODUCTION
Environmental damage caused by human drew attention to the impact of chemicals on the environment. People are encouraged to carefully dispose of unusable goods according to the type of material in early days, so that the potentially useful materials can be recycled. However, there are some goods that are difficult to be recycled, they have to be disposed of by other means like landfill and incineration. These methods may be environmental damaging and unsustainable. Furthermore, non-renewable resources are still being depleted and environmental pollution is increasing. Thus, many developed countries have progressed an extra step further on their environment protection policies, the European Union has implemented two new environmental directives: RoHS (Restriction of the use of certain Hazardous Substances in electrical and electronic equipment) and WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment). The RoHS directive took effect on 1st July 2006, which restricts the use of six hazardous materials in the manufacture of various types of electronic and electrical equipment. It is closely linked with WEEE, whose purpose is to improve the reuse, recycling, and recovery in order to reduce the amount of disposal equipment and the contents going to landfill. For RoHS in EU, it requires that everything that can be identified as a homogeneous material must meet the limit. The regulatory process is becoming more stringent, failing to comply with the regulations means that the products are
management as the basis for environmental product development for SMEs.
