I just started working at a company that does not have an EOL (End of Life) process. I have some ideas about what it should include: impacts on design, procurement, production, customer relationships etc. but do not have an industry standard for such a process. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure but this sounds like Life Cycle Management and you can find guidance on it in the ISO 14040 Series that deals specifically with life cycle.

What is the product?

Some things to consider on your EOL process:-

* How you obtain your customers that will be impacted.
* How you communicate to the customers :Letter, email or via distribution or sales channel.
* Your leadtime for notifying them and their acknowledgement of the communication of EOL (Note this can get you in a sticky situation if your list is out of date). Depending on your business, you may need to prove they received communication and may not have acted on it.
* The time they have to place their last orders (In my companies 6 months)
* The time that they will be allowed to take deliveries (12 months after the 6 months).

EOLs can be good for generating business in a slow time period. However, the marketing manager needs to be involved in driving that as it can impact production as well as kill off a cash cow. No customer likes to do an EOL as they have to select alternatives or they have have to forecast demand for the EOL that doesn't leave too much stock or not enough. That is not an easy call. Enforce EOLs too often and you'll gain a bad reputation on your supply contracts.

Dear Friend,

At the end of life all consumer products become "wastes". Treatment of this EOL waste depends on (a) legislative requirements (b) company policies and (c) stakeholder requirements.

Some of the EOL issues related to the above are under our control and examples of these are (a) use of eco-design principles for all the products and (b) EOL product take back arrangements (including deposit/refund systems, exchange schemes etc).

Some of the EOL issues are not under our control, but still we can help proper handling of EOL product and examples of these are (a) eco-design a product in such a way that the EOL waste is not classified as a hazardous waste and the waste can go to the municipal waste stream (the regulatory norm is not under our control - it may change anytime making a waste hazardous even though one had used eco-design principles in designing the product originally) (b) providing information on seggregating hazardous and non-hazardous part of the EOL (we don't have a control over the customer who is supposed to do the seggregation) and (c) establishing facilities for collection of EOL by third party waste recyclers (we do not have any control over the customer who is supposed to deposit the waste with the recycler).

Some other issues are not under our control, for example the legislative requirement of the EOL poduct. In these cases we should be aware of the legislative trend and our potential liability. We can reduce the liability by informing the customer on how to handle the EOL waste. We can also make efforts to have common facilities (in collaboration with, for example, industry associations) for handling specific wastes.

Now a days people try to use "cradle to cradle" principle to see that at the end of life most of the components of the product are recycled or reused; the amount of waste going to landfills and incinerators is reduced to the minimum by employing eco-design (design for environment) principles at the design stage. Under eco-design we have concepts like "design for recycling", "design for disassembly" and "design for compliance". In the eco-design methodology we follow, we use six focal areas - mass (reducing mass of the product, reduces waste generated at the EOL), substances (eliminating or reducing banned or hazardous substances makes the EOL waste non-hazardous, thereby reducing the cost of waste disposal), energy (this does not have impact at EOL, but high impact during use of the product), recyclability (products are desinged in such a way that the components can be recycled or reused at the EOL), packaging (reducing packaging waste) and life (increased life means extended use of resources, that is in a specific time period less EOL is generated).

My experience so far is that EOL product disposal/recycling can be successful only when there is a legislative pressure (e.g. WEEE). Voluntary initiatives, at least in the Asia Pacific Region, are not successful in handling EOL issues. Most of the marketing people are waiting for evolution of legislation rather than taking proactive actions on this important issue.

With best regards,

Ramakrishnan

Thanks so much for everyone's input. When I first started to read Dr. L. Ramakrishnan response, I didn't think it was applicable as our products are shoes but the more I read I realized that depending on how we disposition the EOL shoes, i.e., sell through, discard, charity, etc. is definitely relevant. I had not considered the waste aspect of EOL.

Thanks for getting this post going and glad I found it.

I work for a medical device company and we're on our 5th generation of our product. Our 1st and 2nd generation devices are out of production (4th doesn't exist...renamed it to our 5th).

I was tasked with creating an End-of-Life procedure for our devices. Never having created a procedure like this before, I scoured Google and the FDA website and found the TPLC (Total Product Life Cycle) requirements. Still a lot of info to ingest and trying to figure out what's the best approach to create a procedure for obsoleting our device. We already have a disposal procedure for our device and not sure if that's adequate for what is required.

I will take a look at ISO 14040 as suggested above.

Any other feedback would be great.

Thanks,

-Renee