Closing the material loop is fundamental to circular economy (CE). However, significant quantities of resources are currently landfilled. Today, companies realise the importance of take-back for CE but face several barriers in implementing it, lack of knowledge, being one such barrier. To address this, a proposal is presented for the design of a configurator to support companies evaluate different approaches, as well as opportunities and challenges for designing and implementing take-back. The paper presents a conceptual framework for the configurator, based on a systematic literature review.

To implement circular economy, manufacturers will need to develop new business models. Available approaches are granular, generic, infrequently focusing on advice or implementation, and lacking practical demonstration. This article presents how a tool was proposed to cover these gaps. Based on design research methodology, twenty-two conceptual and practical requirements were identified and translated in functions for the development of the Circular Economy Business Model Configurator, a tool that supports manufacturers in strengthening proposals of business models for circular economy.

Configurators have been generally accepted as important tools to elicit customers' needs and find the matches between customers' requirements and company's offerings. With product configurators, product design is reduced to a series of selections of attribute values. However, it has been acknowledged that customers are not patient enough to configure a long list of attributes. Therefore, making every round of configuring process productive and hence reducing the number of inputs from customers are of substantial interest to academic and industry alike. In this paper, we present an efficient product configuration approach by incorporating Shapley value, which is a concept used in game theory, to estimate the usefulness of each attribute in the configurator design. This new method iteratively selects the most relevant attribute that can contribute most in terms of information content from the remaining pool of unspecified attributes. As a result from product providers' perspective, each round of configuration can best narrow down the choices with given amount of time. The selection of the next round query is based on the customer's decision on the previous rounds. The interactive process thus runs in an adaptive manner that different customers will have different query sequences. The probability ranking principle is also exploited to give product recommendation to truncate the configuration process so that customers will not be burdened with trivial selection of attributes. Analytical results and numerical examples are also used to exemplify and demonstrate the viability of the method.

This paper presents a study of how the use of product configurators affects business processes of engineering-oriented companies. A literature study shows that only a minor part of product configuration research deals with the effects of product configuration, and that the ones that do are mostly vague when reporting the effects of configurator projects. Only six cases were identified, which provide estimates of the actual size of lead time reduction achieved from product configurators. To broaden this knowledge, this paper presents the results of a study of 14 companies concerning the impact of product configurators on business processes related to the creation of quotes and detailed product specifications. The study documents impressive results of the application of configurator technology. For example, in the data retrieved the use of configurators was estimated to have implied up to a 99.9% reduction of the quotation lead time with an average estimated reduction of 85.5%.