Towards Integrated Product and Package Development

Sammanfattning: The global company operates from a number of locations worldwide, resulting in implications for the transport, handling and storage of product and parts transported within the company as well as between the company divisions and suppliers and/or consumers. In these companies, the package becomes a frequently used object to complement product features and achieve an effective and efficient means of logistics. In this context, it is interesting to integrate package development in the product development process. To corroborate these thoughts, the overall objective for this thesis is to contribute to efficient and effective resource utilisation in global enterprises by providing an overall procedure model for integrating product and package development. Starting with three surveys in Swedish mechanical, pharmaceutical and food industries, which account for approximately 74% of all packaged products produced in Sweden, the potential for the concept was explored and positively validated. By comparisons across survey results and additional information provided by literature reviews of mechanical, pharmaceutical and food product development, the possibility of introducing integrated product and package development into an integrated procedure model has been established. To also include the package developer’s perspective, survey results are complemented with five case studies on the package development process in industry. Additionally, a theoretical exploration has been performed in literature on the concept of integration in product development. Here the applicability of some theories have been evaluated through real industry cases. An integrated product and package procedure model is heavily dependent upon product area. The dependence between product and package design leads to technical, organizational, process and goal oriented implications for the development project. This means that when the product area is known, relevant measures for the integration of product and package activities on an operational level can be developed into the procedure model. Here general recommendations are based on the integration of mechanical engineered products and their adherent packages. For the integration of product and package it is (1) important to include the package in the product mission statement, (2) preferable to consider the function decomposition of product and package when specifying the product and (3) beneficial to also decide upon the package hierarchy and package materials when deciding on detailed product systems and subsystems.