New Product Development for Green and Low-Carbon Products-A Case Study of Taiwan's TFT-LCD Industry

Green supply chain has become an important issue these days due to environment worsening and climate changes. From the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen in 2009, various countries are in agreement that environmental protection is essential and that reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is the most important way to combat global warming. In a conventional supply chain, cost, on-time delivery and quality are treated as the most important factors. However, such a rational is out-dated and cannot keep a firm competitive in the market because of the increasing demands of green products. A green product is manufactured with the goal of reducing the damage to the environment and limiting the use of energy and other resources at any stage of its life, including manufacture, use and disposal. Thus, the reduction of CO2 emission must be considered in the designing and production planning of the product. While more and more researchers are working on the green supply chain management in the past few years, very few have incorporated CO2 emission or carbon footprint into the green new product development (NPD). Therefore, this research aims to propose an integrated model for facilitating the NPD for green and low-carbon products, and a case study is carried out on the TFT-LCD industry. A systemic model based on quality function deployment (QFD) is constructed for developing green and low-carbon products. Literature review and interviews with experts are done first to collect the factors for developing and manufacturing green and low-carbon products. Fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) is applied next to extract the important factors, and the house of quality (HOQ) for product planning is built sequentially. The fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) is adopted last to calculate the importance of engineering characteristics. The results shall provide important information for a TFT-LCD firm in designing a new product.