A Review on Design for Repair Practices and Product Information Management

Repair is a product value recovery strategy that slows down the use of new resources, allowing more time for resource recreation. Although it is one of the cheapest and easier to adopt circular economy strategies, the repair is still poorly applied in practice and less investigated in the literature compared to other strategies, especially in terms of product information management. This paper aims to shed light on Design for Repair practices for circular economy and sustainability, as well as on their data needs, requirements and ownership, which are vital for establishing proper product information management systems across its circular supply chain. A systematic literature review is carried out to collect and classify Design for Repair practices and their data needs. Results show that seven classes of data are needed to enable the adoption of Design for Repair practices in the supply chain of durable products: materials specifications; manufacturing and engineering Bill of Materials; routing lines such as product assembly/disassembly/testing sequences; product specifications; network and service infrastructure data; users’ data reflecting personas; usage data such as use frequency, failures and alerts. The identified practices and their data needs may help practitioners redesign their products in line with current and future Right to Repair regulations.