Sustainable new product development from a life-cycle perspective: An explorative approach toward PLM in the automotive industry

In today's competitive global market, enterprises ought to design, manufacture, and deliver products, both providing value to the customers and being sustainable. Focusing solely on the development of green products is not contemporary anymore. The opportunity to influence product characteristics is prevalent in the product development phase. Hence, companies look for solutions supporting their operations management in fulfilling sustainability requirements and reducing managerial complexity in new product development. As products pass a product life-cycle from design to recycling, an important branch of research is product life-cycle management (PLM) necessitating being evaluated and connected with sustainability and new product development. Besides PLM and sustainability, there is a third concept being relevant for a sustainable new product development. The components of life-cycle management (LCM) support an evaluation of a product's sustainable characteristics across its whole
life-cycle. Therefore, the impact of PLM on a sustainable new product development was investigated.