• Energy Research
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Today, to properly address circular economy practices, strategic decisions encompassing all the various life cycle stages of products or services have become critically important in the market. However, companies still have difficulties in balancing the technical and environmental requirements of their offerings, and numerous studies outline the need for more research on ecodesign tools to support them in decision-making. To reduce such a research gap, a decision-making framework based on the integrated use of the quality function deployment for the environment (QFDE), analytic hierarchy process (AHP), strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT), and TOWS matrix methods was developed through a case study related to the provision of photovoltaic solar systems for domestic use. The results achieved show that to better enhance the company’s offering of ensuring customer satisfaction and green compliance, a shift towards a product–service system (PSS) approach is required, and practical implementation strategies are suggested. Overall, this study contributes to the environmental research literature by streamlining marketing strategy planning decision-making through a novel QFD-based approach that aligns customer requirements with environmental concerns and improvement options. Thus, it provides both academics and practitioners with a useful framework to better address the implementation of circular economy practices.

Optimal spare parts management strategies allow sustaining a system’s availability, while ensuring timely and effective maintenance. Following a systemic perspective, this paper starts from the Multi-Echelon Technique for Recoverable Item Control (METRIC) to investigate the potential use of a Weibull distribution for modelling items’ demand in case of failure. Adapting the analytic formulation of METRIC through a Discrete Weibull distribution, this study originally proposes a METRIC-based model (DW-METRIC) to be used for modelling the stochastic demand in multi-item systems, in order to ensure process sustainability. The DW-METRIC has been tested in a case study related to an industrial plant constituted by 98 items in a passive redundancy configuration. Comparing the results via a simulation model, the outcomes of the study allow defining applicability criteria for the DW-METRIC, in those settings where the DW-METRIC offers more accurate estimations than the traditional METRIC.