Design for Functional Sales - A Case Study of Forklift Trucks at BT Industries

Having a life cycle perspective on products and services in the business strategy of functional sales is important as the strategy emerges and more and more companies see the benefits of controlling a larger share of the product value chain. It has become clear that a life cycle perspective needs to be addressed in such areas as manufacturing, use, maintenance and remanufacturing. This paper focuses on the product design issues for functional sales. Since the volumes of products being sold though functional sales and/or being remanufactured is increasing, these design issues need to be considered in a larger scale. In the paper, design improvements for functional sales of forklift trucks are described. Many of these improvements deal with the accessibility of parts and components during maintenance and remanufacturing operations. In general, the forklift trucks at the case study company (BT Industries) are easy to perform maintenance and remanufacturing on. However, there are improvements that could be done, and most of these seem fairly easy to perform. These results are in line with other product analyses previously conducted by the first author