Minjung Kwak

Soongsil University · Department of Industrial & Information Systems Engineering

Identifying which attributes of a product are important to customers and clarifying how the attributes affect customer satisfaction are critical for a firm to survive and succeed in the market. To assist in characterizing the impacts of various attributes and prioritizing the attributes for design and marketing purposes, this paper proposes a novel...

As sustainability and circularity are emerging as the new normal for business, manufacturers have attempted to apply recovery strategies such as reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling to product family design to generate higher profits and mitigate the environmental impact. Compared to single-product design, product family design involves developing...

To achieve a “green profit” in their businesses, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who produce both new and remanufactured products must optimize their pricing and production decisions. They must determine the buyback price and takeback quantity of end-of-life products (i.e., supply) as well as the selling prices and production quantities of...

Understanding and enhancing product quality and competitiveness are vital in today's market. By leveraging the significant potential of online reviews for market-wide consumer research and strategic quality enhancement, this study introduces a novel review analytics approach that combines Importance Performance Competitor Analysis (IPCA) with the K...

The promise of product and design analytics has been widespread and more engineering designers are attempting to extract valuable knowledge from large-scale data. This paper proposes a new demand modeling technique, Demand Trend Mining (DTM), for Predictive Life Cycle Design. The first contribution of this work is the development of the DTM algorit...

This study aims to analyze global research trends in the life cycle assessment (LCA) of service products. Using the Scopus database, we searched for LCA research published from 1970 to 2024 based on keywords, titles, and abstracts. A total of 23,970 records were obtained, of which 90.67% were published from 2010 to 2024, showing a significant incre...

With the growth of e-commerce market, personalized recommendation systems have emerged as a critical success factor in various industries. In the video game industry, previous recommendation systems were intended for existing users and required historical data on user purchases and ratings. In this study, a game recommendation system based on custo...

Review-based control charts that integrate sentiment analysis with traditional control charts are emerging as effective tools for analyzing customer complaints. However, existing approaches face significant challenges due to their lack of alignment with the natural characteristics of online reviews, such as limited review volumes or imbalanced ment...

Review-based control charts that combine sentiment analysis with conventional statistical control charts are emerging as a promising solution for monitoring complaints. However, existing review-based control charts have fundamental issues in that they may not fit the natural characteristics of online customer reviews. This study aims to establish a...

Online reviews are a valuable information source for understanding how product attributes affect customer preference and satisfaction. To characterize the impact of attributes and prioritize them for design and marketing purposes, previous review-analytics approaches have primarily employed three measures of attribute impact: appearance (stated imp...

A prevailing assumption in research on remanufactured products is "the cheaper, the better". Customers prefer prices that are as low as possible. Customer price preference is modeled as a linear function with the minimal price at customers' willingness to pay (WTP), which is assumed to be homogeneous and constant in the market. However, this linear...

Review-based control charts that combine online review mining with traditional control charts are emerging as a new tool for quality monitoring. Although previous studies have provided successful examples of the review-based control chart, the natural characteristics of user-generated reviews and their impact on the chart have received less attenti...

Understanding consumer valuation of remanufactured products is vital to the success of the remanufacturing business. However, whether and how product categories and business models influence the consumer valuation have not been investigated in detail. To test the effects of product categories and business models on the consumer valuation and accept...

Remanufacturing used cell phones can be a sustainable solution to e-waste problems. To support planning and optimization of cell phone remanufacturing, this paper presents an empirical study on the economics of cell phone remanufacturing process. The study aims to assess the economic remanufacturability of a cell phone by collecting real-world data...

To survive and succeed in the hotel industry, it is critical for a hotel to understand its customers’ needs and their satisfaction levels. Opinion mining of online customer reviews can be a promising solution to this end. However, opinion mining for a single hotel alone is insufficient to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the hotel. For a bet...

Sentiment analysis of online customer reviews is gaining increasing interests in the field of product design. This paper raises a concern for a common approach in the field of product design, where all reviews of a product are aggregated and analyzed as a whole. Considering that reviews are generated at different times over a long life cycle, a sig...

Sentiment analysis, also referred to as opinion mining, has received increasing attention as a method for evaluating customer satisfaction with hotel services. By identifying the emotions behind a review, sentiment analysis can provide useful information to support quality management and marketing. With an aim of addressing the lack of sentiment-an...

For original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), producing a line of new and remanufactured products can be an effective strategy for improving the sustainability of their business. The potential cannibalization of new product sales and the technological obsolescence of used products, however, can create barriers for OEMs to embrace remanufacturing. In...

With the aim of finding key attributes of hotel service quality in Korea, this paper presents an analysis based on online review mining. Online review mining is known as an effective means of understanding customer needs and identifying key attributes for customer satisfaction. In this paper, a total of 8,791 online reviews on 157 hotels in Seoul,...

With an aim to better understand the past research on remanufacturing, this paper presents a literature review using the citation network analysis. Based on objective information (i.e., citations among journals and articles), a brief overview of the research on remanufacturing is provided. More specifically, two analyses are described: (1) centrali...

Mobile applications (mobile apps) are major ways of using a smartphone. They can greatly affect environmental performance of a smartphone. To better understand potential implications of mobile apps on environmental impact of smartphones, this empirical study performed three analyses: (1) mobile apps usage behavior survey, (2) energy and data consum...

This paper investigates how product attributes affect consumer judgments of the preference and distinctiveness of a product. In an empirical study with 131 smartphone users, we examine what attributes are the most important in judging preference and distinctiveness of a smart phone and analyze whether or not there is any difference between preferen...

Appropriate pricing and production planning plays a key role in optimizing remanufacturing. Buy-back price of an end-of-life product enables to manage the quantity and quality of supply, while selling price of a remanufactured product allows to control demand. Production planning makes it possible to match the supply and demand at the minimum cost....

http://www.icicelb.org/ellb/contents/2016/5/elb-07-05-10.pdf

In order for remanufacturers to succeed in the market, it is important for them to be capable of ensuring in advance that a product is suitable for remanufacturing and that a remanufactured product will provide greater economic and environmental value than a brand-new product. This paper provides an approach to estimate the economic and environment...

Whether to extend a product's lifetime or replace it with a new one is a common question in durable good markets. This paper addresses the issue that there exist products that are more suitable for lifetime extension, but assessment models for identifying such products are scarce. As a means to discern whether or not a product is appropriate for li...

Remanufacturing used, end-of-life products is a complex problem involving multiple types of products that may share common parts. Recovery targets assigned by market demand and environmental legislation add more difficulty to the problem. Manufacturers now need to achieve specified take-back and recovery rates while fulfilling demands for remanufac...

With growing concerns about environmental problems, reducing the adverse environmental impact of consumer products is emerging as a great challenge. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an essential tool in addressing the challenge. By examining all phases of product life cycle (i.e., production, usage, and end-of-life treatment), LCA quantifies how much...

Remanufacturing is emerging as a promising solution for achieving green, profitable businesses. This article considers a manufacturer that produces new products and also remanufactured versions of the new products that become available at the end of their life cycle. For such a manufacturer, design decisions at the initial design stage determine bo...

Remanufacturing is emerging as a promising solution for achieving green, profitable businesses. This paper considers a manufacturer that produces new products and also remanufactures products that become available at the end of their lifecycle. For such a manufacturer, design decisions determine both the initial profit from manufacturing and future...

To achieve “green profit” in their business, manufacturers who produce both new and remanufactured products must optimize their pricing and production decisions simultaneously. They must determine the buy-back price and take-back quantity of end-of-life products as well as the selling prices and production quantities of new and remanufactured produ...

Product family design via component sharing is a widely practiced approach for offering sufficient variety to the market in an economical way. Most of the previous research has focused on the benefits of product family in the design and manufacturing stages—early stages of product family lifecycle. This chapter highlights another important aspect o...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an essential tool for achieving design for life cycle. An LCA examines all stages of a product’s life cycle and gives a quantitative assessment of its potential environmental impact. The results of the LCA help identify priority areas for improvement and ways to reduce environmental impacts. This paper presents a comp...

This paper presents a generic model for evaluating the economic and environmental impacts of product service lifetime, which is important and useful in the design and management of PSS. From a PSS provider’s perspective, the presented model conducts life-cycle costing (LCC) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) simultaneously and quantifies the total lif...

In a market with rapid changes in technology and customer preferences, technological obsolescence of end-of-life products poses a significant challenge to product recovery. Remanufacturing with optimal part upgrades can be a promising solution for overcoming the obsolescence. This paper proposes a model for positioning a remanufactured product. By...

Recovering end-of-life products is emerging as a key challenge for manufacturers, as awareness of sustainability grows and environmental regulations become more stringent. End-of-life recovery is a large-scale problem involving multiple types of end-of-life products that may share common parts amongst them. Environmental regulations and market dema...

Extending the life of a product through remanufacturing or refurbishing is generally regarded as being “greener” than new production, as it avoids the resource consumption and waste generation associated with the new production; however, when considering improved performance of new products, extending the lifetime of less efficient, less productive...

The Predictive Product Lifecycle Design (PPLD) model that is proposed in this paper enables a company to optimize its product lifecycle design strategy by considering pre-life and end-of-life at the initial design stage. By combining lifecycle design and predictive trend mining technique, the PPLD model can reflect both new and remanufactured produ...

This paper presents a method for comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of two distinctively different systems based on industrial heavy-duty off-road equipment. The study demonstrates how to compare the environmental impact performance of two different machines when they perform the same types of operations, but have different levels of operation...

This paper presents a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) study of heavy duty off-road equipment. The machine studied here is a typical piece of diesel construction machinery equipped with the iT4 (interim Tier 4) certified diesel engine. Two life cycle impact assessment methods, Eco-Indicator 99 and IPCC 2007, are used to calculate the envir...

Second-hand market value is important for manufacturers in that it affects the profitabil-ity of both new product sales and end-of-life recovery. To gain a better understanding of second-hand market value, this paper presents an empirical study of buy-back price using laptop computers and mobile phones as examples. A thousand items that were on the...

The quantity and age of the incoming stream of "feedstock" from product take-back systems are known as the major sources of the uncertainty that complicates the e-waste recovery. This paper presents the results of an analysis of data from an incoming stream for an e-waste collection center and analyzes the quantity and age of e-waste by product typ...

Estimating residual value of an end-of-life product is an essential preliminary to design for recovery. This paper presents a quantitative model for estimating time-varying value of an end-of-life product. The model estimates the expected economic value of a product by considering two major depreciation factors, physical deterioration and technolog...

In a market with rapid changes in technology and customer preferences, technological obsolescence of end-of-life products poses a significant challenge to product end-of-life recovery. Remanufacturing with appropriate part upgrade can be a promising solution for overcoming obsolescence. This paper proposes a model for positioning a remanufactured p...

Product family design via component sharing is a widely practiced approach for offering sufficient variety to the market in an economical way. When discussing product family design, most previous research has focused on its benefits in the design and manufacturing stages. This article highlights another important aspect of product family design: th...

Buying back used products and reselling them to the second-hand market has emerged as a new business model in the consumer electronics market. The price that a buyback company pays for a used product is important for manufacturers in that it affects new product sales as well as end-of-life recovery. To clarify what the key factors are in deciding b...

The quantity and age of the incoming stream of "feedstock" from product take-back systems are known as the major sources of the uncertainty that complicates the e-waste recovery. This paper presents the results of an analysis of data from an incoming stream for an e-waste collection center and analyzes the quantity and age of e-waste by product typ...

Recently strengthened environmental regulations have obligated manufacturing companies to treat end-of-life (EOL) products both environmentally consciously and economically. EOL treatment begins with disassembling a product into recyclable or disposable sub-assemblies. Therefore, the economic value of an EOL product is largely a function of the pla...

Product recovery has become a field of rapidly growing interest for product manufactur-ers as a promising solution for product stewardship as well as for economic viability. Because product recovery is highly dependent on the way a product is designed, it should be considered in the design stage so that the product is designed to have high recovery...

Environmental protection legislation, consumer interest in "green" products, a trend toward corporate responsibility and recognition of the potential profitability of salvaging operations, has resulted in increased interest in product take back. However, the cost effectiveness of product take-back operations is hampered by many factors, including t...

In order to improve ease of disassembly and recycling of a product at its retirement stage, it is essential to design a product architecture that allows for easy disassembly and recycling. In this paper, a novel concept of eco-architecture is introduced, and the eco-architecture analysis, a design approach supporting the end-of-life decision making...

Environmental protection legislation, consumer interest in “green” products, a trend towards corporate responsibility and recognition of the potential profitability of salvaging operations have resulted in increased interest in product take-back. However, the cost-effectiveness of product take-back operations is hampered by many factors, including...

Product recovery has become a field of rapidly growing interest for product manufacturers as a promising solution for product stewardship as well as economic viability. As product recovery is a process highly dependent upon the way a product is designed, it should be considered early at the design stage so that the product may be designed to facili...

Economic value of the end-of-life (EOL) product largely depends on a plan of disassembly: how it should be divided into smaller subassemblies and which subassemblies should be disassembled first. To make these decisions, a disassembly structure which means all possible subassembly divisions and their disassembly paths from the bigger assemblies has...

In recent years, sustainable product design has become a great concern to product manufacturers. An effective way to enhance the product sustainability is to design products that are easy to disassemble and recycle. An EOL strategy is concerned with how to disassemble a product and what to do with each of the resulting disassembled parts. A sound u...

The problem addressed in this paper is that the incoming stream of “feedstock” from product take-back systems is known to be widely variable, but the type and extent of that variability have not been well defined. This paper presents an analysis of data from an incoming e-waste stream for a computer refurbisher, and analyzes the type and degree of...