From Manufacturing Green Office Furniture to providing Sustainable Workplace Services: A necessary change in practices, tools and approaches
Résumé
A world leader company in office furniture like Steelcase is moving its business from manufacturing physical products toward more integrated solutions for work environment. Through this new strategy, this company aims to develop a new business which makes possible to satisfy the various needs of customer and workspace users, to anticipate the future tendencies, organisational and cultural changes in work and to be in compliance with sustainability recommendations. The objective of this paper is to feature Steelcase company within its actual competing situation, to characterize from a design point of view, its know-how, its processes and tools. After this statement, we stress the issues raised by the shift from a current state of green product offer to sustainable integrated solutions of workplace. One of the main challenges is to monitor the emerging performances of the design alternatives - technical, economical, environmental and social - during the design process and to be able to comment a few variant solutions in a multicriteria way to the clients. The suggested solution is to adopt a modelling and capitalization approach for the performance measurement of workplace solutions.
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