Existing industrial cases

Remanufacturing is an industrial process which aims at getting back products to their initial performances. This end of use strategy, with a high added-value retained from used products, is already a reality in companies. Two others strategies are now highlighted as valuable strategies with a potential higher demand by society with higher sustainability ambitions: Upgrading and Repurposing. Upgraded products are remanufactured products of an initial family with different performances and functions. Repurposed products are products that are remanufactured and sold for a different purpose and belong to a different product family. So, repurposed products belong to new markets.

We don’t have yet many industrial cases for repurposed product, but the repurposing and upgrading processes are close to the remanufacturing processes. The same types of operations are necessary, even when the combinations of parts are larger. The main difference is that the diagnostic phase on the quality of the used products collected (the product health) must be much more detailed and very intelligent in pursuit of orienting the core to the most adapted transformation process.