Turning vision into reality

Responding to the Voice of the Customer in the early '90s, Xerox synthesized a vision for the next generation of environmentally friendly products. The goal became to design, in waste free offices, a digital platform for a new category of products, to manufacture it in waste free factories, and to ensure that none of its parts end up in the landfill. The vision would incorporate benchmark levels of noise, energy consumption, emissions and environmental friendly materials. The Beta Site (test program) for the vision was code named "Lakes", a mid-volume networked digital multifunction platform. The first product from the Lakes family, the Document Centre 265, a sixty-five print per minute black and white digital copier, has completed its first year of production with over twenty five thousand installs around the world. The implementation of the "Zero to Landfill" vision created many challenges, both within the product development group and across the different organizations of the corporation. A new paradigm had to be established where engineers and management considered the environment in every aspect of the design. Hundreds of managers, engineers and technicians were taken off site, into the woods, for a week of ecology training. Design standards were changed to include environment and remanufacturing codes. New processes were developed to support "product take-back" and complete end-of-life recycling. In turning this vision into reality, the Lakes program has provided Xerox with many lessons learned. These included establishing the necessary infrastructure all along the value chain, using consultants to break barriers and facilitate change, working with suppliers to achieve a common goal, and removing myths within the corporation to reflect reality. In short, changing the product design paradigm.