Repairability scoring at DECATHLON

In other words, how do you know what is likely to get damaged on a product?

This is a crucial stage: the rest of the methodology stems from this. Subsequently, people in charge of collecting the available data have to carefully work out from the data to understand (and quantify) what are a product's principal faults.

What this means in practice is that a network of specialists, within DECATHLON, is responsible for analysing these faults, by product type.
Those who want to become a specialist must take a 2-hour course to understand the methodology to analyse faults.

What is a complete solution?
At DECATHLON, what is understood by the notion of “complete” repair is one based on 4 criteria:
- disassembly
- availability of spare parts
- repair price
- documentation

There are sub-criteria for each of these criteria. For example, within “disassembly”, you find: average product disassembly time, the tools required and the type of fix (stitch or patch, for example).
These are the same criteria as those put in place by the ADEME for the French repairability index. 

Each fault detected during diagnosis is assigned a fault percentage.
If a fault has a complete repair solution (available parts, disassembled product, price ok and documentation ok), it subsequently “earns” the associated fault percentage.
Even if there is just one “NOK”, the product “loses” the related percentage.

This is what lets us calculate the damage and failure coverage percentage.
In the example imagined above, the tent “loses” 31% of damage and failure because the repair price is greater than 30% of the new product's price.

For the score out of 10, the points weighting system is similar to the one established by the ADEME.

DECATHLON continued defining reference frameworks for the 120 product types identified as priority products*, i.e. establishing the criteria and thresholds that product engineers are required to respect for each one. In 2024, a framework was devised to assess product repairability for 95 of these product types.

To contribute to product ecodesign, the teams published two repairable design guides for textiles and equipment this year.
Product engineers can use these to help them choose materials and techniques when designing repairable products.
In 2024, 624 products were granted the “repairable ecodesign” qualification (5% of all products benefitting from an ecodesign approach).

*Product types are prioritised based on their carbon impact and their circularity potential