Manufacturing system sustainability through lean and agile initiatives

Sustainability is one of the most critical issues facing manufacturers today. The industries must develop new and innovative approaches to ensure sustainability in economic, environmental and social aspects. The operational excellence strategies such as Lean and Agile manufacturing can be applied in the industries that add value to the product by eliminating waste and quickly respond to dynamic changes in demand. This paper presents a framework that builds and assesses the sustainability of the manufacturing system with combined lean and agile concepts. Analytical Hierarchy Process and Analytical Network Process are identified as suitable methodologies to analyze the model. The model is validated in an Ayurveda Pharmaceutical industry to identify the most important factors of lean and agile manufacturing that build and enable the sustainability dimensions such as Economic, Environmental, Social, Technological and Ethical. The results show that the industry focuses more on economic aspects of sustainability followed by social, environmental, ethics and technological dimensions of sustainability in the case of a lean perspective. For an agile perspective, the weightage is more for social dimension followed by ethics, economic, technological and environmental dimensions of sustainability.     

Application of fuzzy QFD for enabling sustainability

Contemporary manufacturing organisations recognise sustainability as an important concept for survival. Environmental awareness and recycling regulations have been compelling manufacturers and consumers to evolve sustainable strategies. The modern customers' voices need to be translated with care into technical requirements. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a technique extensively used for this purpose. In order to cope with the vagueness associated with relationships and correlations in QFD, fuzzy numbers have been integrated within a QFD framework and fuzzy QFD has been used in this study. The study is concerned with the application of fuzzy QFD for enabling sustainability in an Indian modular switches manufacturing organisation. The approach is effective in the identification of sustainable competitive bases, sustainable decision domains, sustainable attributes and sustainable enablers for the organisation. The improvement in sustainability has been measured from three perspectives. The results gained as a result of the study indicated that fuzzy QFD could be used as an enabler of sustainability.     

Evaluation of sustainability using an integrated approach at process and product level: a case study

The present world is facing problems like rapid depletion of natural resources and undesired environmental changes on a global scale. Manufacturing organisations are realising the importance of mitigating the present crisis and are adopting sustainable manufacturing principles. Since it is important to achieve sustainable manufacturing, sustainability assessment models were developed. Sustainability assessment models have their own drawbacks and may not provide clear scope for complete sustainable development. A system approach has been developed to overcome this shortcoming by integrating various sustainability assessment models that are already in practice. This article reports the advantages of collecting the advantages of individual sustainability assessment models and how the implementation of the integrated approach has helped to identify the current sustainability level and the scope for future developments in an automotive industry.     

A Graph Theory approach to measure the performance of sustainability enablers in a manufacturing organization

In a manufacturing organization, the term sustainability deals with the impact of production process and products on the environment and society, laying emphasis on preservation of scarce resources. In this article, the study concentrates on developing a Graph Theory model to measure the performance and inter-relationship between the sustainability enablers in an organization, thereby to quantitatively measure the extent to which ‘sustainable manufacturing’ practices are being followed in the organization. The objective of this study was to identify a set of sustainability enablers and attributes that impact a manufacturing organization. Digraphs were developed for the whole system and sub-systems depicting the inter-relationships and dependencies between various enablers and attributes to interpret the performance of the sustainability enablers in the case organization. Using the best case and worst case values, the level of sustainable manufacturing practices of the organization was found by Comprehensive Assessment Index. Based on the best case values, the relative significance of individual sustainability enablers are found and compared with worst case situations. The impacts of individual enablers on the overall sustainability level of the organization were also studied.     

Sustainable outsourcing: a practice survey and research opportunities

This paper addresses the issue of the sustainability imperative and its influence on outsourcing practice. The research initially finds that there is currently little or no work that explores sustainable or green outsourcing, other than in an information technology context. This lack of research on sustainable outsourcing practice in the industrial organisation sector led to the development of this research study. This exploratory study used a qualitative survey tool to investigate current industrial practice. Manufacturing managers in 57 organisations formed the survey sample. The data were analysed by comparison and clustering of responses of survey participants. This study contributes five key findings that demonstrate current industrial practice which includes: 32% of respondents state that sustainability is not a factor in their outsourcing decision making and 65% of small- and medium-sized enterprises had never heard of the ‘triple bottom line’ concept. Future research needs are identified and proposed highlighting that urgent development of research is required in outsourcing performance measurement and also in considering sustainability as a new manufacturing competitive priority.     

Computing sustainable manufacturing index with fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

The growing industrial interest in adopting sustainability programmes has ushered in studies regarding sustainability indicators which have continually flourished in current literature. However, limited attention is given to the development of priority ranking, which is an important input for any adopting firm. This paper presents a hybrid multi-criteria approach in determining priority areas in sustainable manufacturing (SM). Using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to address uncertainty in hierarchical decision-making, this paper determines SM priority strategies and eventually identifies even lower level strategies. The computed sustainable manufacturing index is presented at both the organizational and operational levels for a real case study of an industrial plastic manufacturing firm. This work provides a detailed and transparent hierarchical decision-making approach based on SM framework, the use of which could be valuable to practicing managers across industries in their pursuit of greater sustainability.     

State-of-the-art sustainability analysis methodologies for efficient decision support in green production operations

Over the last three decades, new concepts, strategies, frameworks and systems have been developed to tackle the sustainable development issue. This paper reviews the challenges, perspectives and recent advances in support of sustainable production operations decision-making. The aim of this review is to provide a holistic understanding of advanced scientific analysis methodologies for the evaluation of sustainability, to provide efficient decision support. Over 100 publications have been analysed, and a characterisation of state-of-the-art sustainability analysis methodologies has been produced, which includes life cycle assessment and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), along with their applications to three key areas of production operations: sustainable design, sustainable manufacture and sustainable supply chain management. Distribution of existing work is discussed and future research directions are elicited from the literature. The paper finds three trends in supporting sustainable production operations decisions: (a) sustainability analysis has moved to whole life cycle assessment from single-stage assessment, (b) sustainability analysis has shifted away from single criterion to MCDA and (c) sustainability analysis has evolved from stand-alone approaches to integrated systematic methodologies. The paper concludes that integrated sustainability analysis can provide more efficient and effective support to complex decision-making in sustainable production operations.     

Developing a sustainability assessment framework for integrated management of water resources systems using distributed zoning and system dynamics approaches

The management of large-scale water resources systems requires including of different stakeholders and users from municipal, agricultural, industrial and environmental sectors. This has baffled the process of decision making for integrated water resource systems. In such systems, the interactions between various stakeholders must be carefully taken into account with the goal of aggregating interests around the sustainability concept. In this study, first, the integrated water resources systems of Big Karun Watershed, Iran, have been modeled using the system dynamics approach. The system dynamics model represents the interactions between different components of the system, including water transfer projects, dams, urban, industry, agriculture and fish farming, and environmental demands. Vensim software has been used for the system dynamics modeling. Vensim simulates the dynamics behavior of the sub-systems and overall performance of the system by comparing the current operation policies with the future management scenarios. A wide range of performance indices, such as quantitative and qualitative water stress, income, cost, and productivity, have been used here to represent different aspects of sustainability goals. Finally, the performance of the systems has been evaluated by developing a sustainability index using distributed zoning model in order to identify proper management policies for this watershed. The results indicate that downstream users demand cannot be fully met by solely considering inter-basin water transfer and agricultural development projects. The sustainable and integrated management of the whole system ties into enhancement in both infrastructure systems and the operation of the whole system. It is expected that the sustainability of the basin improves if a water market schema exists and the gained money would be used to enhance the efficiency of existing irrigation networks.

     

A comparison of four sustainable manufacturing strategies

Effective use of materials is one possible component of a sustainable manufacturing strategy. There are many such strategies proposed in the literature and used in practice, with confusion over what they are, what the differences among them may be and how they can be used by practitioners in design and manufacture to improve the sustainability of their product and processes. This paper reviews the literature on sustainable manufacturing strategies that deliver improved material performance. Four primary strategies were found: waste minimisation; material efficiency; resource efficiency; and eco‐efficiency. The literature was analysed to determine the key characteristics of these sustainable manufacturing strategies and 17 characteristics were found. The four strategies were then compared and contrasted against all the characteristics. While current literature often uses these strategy titles in a confusing, occasionally inter‐changeable manner, this study attempts to create clear separation between them. Definition, scope and practicality of measurement are shown to be key characteristics that impact upon the ability of manufacturing companies to make effective use of the proposed strategy. It is observed that the most actionable strategies may not include all of the dimensions of interest to a manufacturer wishing to become more sustainable, creating a dilemma between ease of implementation and breadth of impact.     

Supplier evaluation and selection for sustainable supply chain management under uncertainty conditions

Abstract

With the global increasing importance of sustainable development, sustainable supply chain has gained value among both researchers and industrialists in the last decade. Nowadays, industries are facing pressure from government legislation and the global competition in addition to the pressure from their clients to carry out environmentally – conscious actions. Thus, organisations are required to implement actions to enhance their level of both environmental and economic performances. Traditionally, organisations use criteria such as cost, quality and on-time delivery to evaluate their suppliers’ performance. Although there have been numerous studies on the common criteria for these assessments, very few studies have taken sustainable criteria into consideration. Thereupon, this study tries to put forward a complete model for selection and evaluation of the suppliers, considering three criteria for sustainability, thus using the fuzzy group graph theory and matrix approach. It is an innovative approach based on fuzzy logic and group decision-making, which aims to treat lack of certainty in selection and evaluation of suppliers. We will also discuss a case study in the industry to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.     

Development of composite sustainable supply chain performance index for the automobile industry

The automobile companies are becoming increasingly aware about the importance of sustainability and its challenges. In order to compete in the global market, the industry has responded to these challenges by identifying the sustainability indicators. It is quite difficult to evaluate the performance of the company on the basis of large number of sustainability indicators. Integration of key sustainability indicators is quite essential for effective decision-making. This article presents an integrated method by accommodating both qualitative and quantitative approaches for the development of composite sustainable supply chain (SC) performance index. We applied an integration of fuzzy analytical hierarchy process, Liberatore score and signal-to-noise ratio approaches to compute the index. The proposed methodology demonstrates how quantitative statistical inputs can be combined with expert opinion to construct an overall index of sustainability. The index can be extensively used by SC managers to measure their organization's contribution towards SC sustainability. An application of an integrated methodology is demonstrated for an automobile SC.     

Decision support for sustainable manufacturing using decision guidance query language

Sustainability has become a very significant research topic as it impacts many different manufacturing industries. Therefore, the technologies for monitoring, analysing, evaluating and optimising the sustainability performance of manufacturing processes and systems are very critical for decision makers on the shop floor. This paper introduces a decision guidance management system that provides actionable recommendations through quantitative analysis of the sustainability measures of manufacturing processes and systems based on life cycle assessment. The system determines decision preferences through dynamically collected data and decision makers' responses, taking into account the prevailing constraints. Optimal decisions can be derived using mathematical and constraint programming. By using decision guidance query language, this methodology allows users to make optimal decisions without an extensive mathematical or operations research background. Knowledge of relational databases is sufficient for a user to formulate the optimisation problem and obtain optimal solutions. The methodology is demonstrated with a machining operation case study, in which a list of sustainability metrics are identified and sustainability modelling methods are proposed. Important sustainable machining performance measures are optimised, resulting in actionable recommendations.     

大庆市城市经济系统可持续性评价

三角模型作为一种直观的平台能够很好地图解区域可持续综合发展状况及长期趋势.由于具有直观性和简明性,三角模型易于被不同层次的学者和政策制定者理解和应用.根据经济发展、资源-能源消耗及环境污染的相互关系,结合生态学表现,利用三角模型工具分析评估区域经济可持续发展状况和长期趋势.本文选择我国最大的石油资源型城市--大庆市作为典型案例.大庆市位于黑龙江省西部,下辖5个区和4个县,2006年全市土地总面积为2.1219万hm2,总人口269.3万.结果表明,大庆市经济系统可持续性状况不容乐观,"八五"、"九五"时期处于不可持续和弱可持续性状态,"十五"中后期才缓慢进入一般可持续性状态;"八五"时期大庆市经济系统具有一般可持续性发展趋势,"九五"时期呈现强可持续性发展趋势,进入新世纪后却呈现出由强可持续性向一般可持续性的发展趋势.     

区域水资源可持续利用评价的FAHP-PP模型

正确评价区域水资源可持续利用，对区域社会、经济的可持续发展以及生态环境的良性循环都具有重要意义，而区域水资源可持续利用指标体系及评价方法研究是水资源可持续利用研究的基础。借鉴现有评价指标体系的优点，并充分考虑现有评价指标体系所忽略的某些环境因素对水资源可持续利用的影响，针对区域社会-经济-环境复合系统的特点，提出了由区域水资源条件、水资源开发利用程度、区域水资源与社会协调程度、区域水资源与环境协调程度4个子系统及评价指标组成的区域水资源可持续利用评价指标体系。根据水资源系统的随机性、模糊性等特性以及系统评价的公正、客观要求，为规避评价方法的主观性与客观性影响，分别应用主观性较强的模糊层次分析法（FAHP）与客观性较强的投影寻踪模型（PP）对区域水资源可持续利用水平进行评价，并将两种方法的评价结果进行加权求和以实现优势互补，以此建立了区域水资源评价的一种新模型（FAHP PP），然后通过以上海市1998～2007年水资源可持续利用情况为例对该评价指标体系的合理性及方法的有效性进行了说明.     

Relative Assessment of Indicators in Sustainability Enhancement (RAISE): a first approach in the manufacturing stage of products

The estimation of the sustainability performance of products requires tools to provide systematic approaches to the definition of impacts, indicators and comparative scenarios from early design stages. This paper illustrates the Relative Assessment of Indicators in Sustainability Enhancement (RAISE) methodology that is based on the measure of negative impacts generated during any product life cycle stage. This approach includes a systematic process for the definition and evaluation of indicators to compare the sustainability performance of products considering each indicator individually and using a holistic index of sustainability to entail an overall comparison between products from manufacturing scenarios. The RAISE method is developed with the aim of assessing sustainability performance of product life cycle stages and incorporating this assessment into the decision-making process when comparing different manufacturing scenarios. A guitar capo manufactured in polymeric material is used as case study to demonstrate the use of the method. In this paper, only the manufacturing stage is considered; however, the method can also be employed in other stages of the life cycle.     

Structure of industrial or corporate sustainability programmes

The 15 years up until 2008 have seen an escalating growth in corporate or industrial sustainability programmes to a current level of about 25% of the Fortune 1000 firms. This preliminary study of corporate sustainability programmes yielded a repeatable structure of these programmes that may be unique to industry in the broader sustainability field. These corporate sustainability programmes are different from the prior corporate social responsibility programmes and also are a subset of the vast current use of the word sustainable. The corporate sustainability model is built on four pillars (business excellence, innovation, human contribution and environment) that offer important directions for long-term decision making. In-depth sustainability programme studies revealed recurring principles that reflect current industry or corporate sustainability programmes.     

生态旅游的可持续性评价模型研究——以九寨沟景区为例

在生态环境脆弱区域开展旅游活动,其发展目标必须是可持续的。而生态旅游可持续性的标准因不同旅游区（点）或处在不同的时间段会产生差异,使用评价指标体系的方法可以反映出并弥补这种差异给可持续性评价带来的影响。以位于岷江上游的世界自然遗产地九寨沟景区为例,使用主观方法分析资源、社区和旅游三大利益相关者在生态旅游可持续性中的关系,建立生态旅游地可持续性评价模型的框架。使用德尔菲法确定相应的评价指标;通过对当地居民和旅游管理部门的访谈和旅游者问卷调查来探察利益相关者间的关系;根据访谈和调查结果对模型评价结果进行验证。研究以九寨沟景区为案例,评价模型的构建为生态旅游地的可持续性管理提供了一种主观与客观相结合的评价工具,并可以推广到其他景区。     

国内外可持续发展评价方法对比分析

国际、国内很多组织都对可持续性评价方法进行过研究分析,但大多是特定的案例研究.目前国内外对可持续发展评价方法没有一个全面系统的分析比较,使得不同地区比较起来很困难.本文对各种评价方法如环境可持续性指数法、生态足迹法、能值分析法和指标综合评价法的来源、理论和应用作了介绍.得出各方法适用范围:可持续性指数法适合于国家间的综合评价;生态足迹和能值分析法适合于各种范围,包括国家、区域、地区和小系统;指标体系综合评价法对于小范围更合适.同时对各种方法的优势和缺陷进行了分析讨论,得出:可持续性指数法信息量大,但是计算复杂;生态足迹法计算过程简单,但是缺失一些可持续性信息;能值分析法考虑问题全面,但是其原理涉及热力学知识,很难被一些学者认同;指标体系评价法变通性较大,可随着评价系统的变化而进行调整,但是主观性较强.通过分析指出不同方法适用范围并指出每种分析方法的优势和不足,为以后选择合适的分析方法评价对象的可持续性提供依据.     

中国西部地区可持续能力透视

本文基于目前可持续发展领域的研究成果,对中国区域,尤其是西部地区的可持续能力进行评估,从整体的高度诊断出西部地区可持续发展的制约因素和障碍,并就增强 事的可持续能力提出几点建议,以此为中开发决策奠定了一些理论基础。     

Green Lean Six Sigma implementation framework: a case of reducing graphite and dust pollution

ABSTRACT

Modern organisations are in search of initiatives which will enable them to be sustainable as well as gain a competitive advantage. Lean, Six Sigma and Green initiatives are some of the widely used tools which aid the organisation to be sustainable. Recent studies have suggested that the integration of Green and Lean Six Sigma (LSS) will create a powerful methodology and help organisations to be sustainable. Yet, many organisations have found it difficult due to the lack of a generic implementation framework, which can be used for any processes and cultural context. The purpose of this study is to answer the research question: how to implement a sustainable Green LSS initiative in the organisation. Through a critical analysis of previous literature, an implementation framework is developed and practically implemented through a case study to reduce the graphite and dust pollution in a mine in India. Within case analysis, it is conducted to develop propositions, future research directions and managerial implications. This is a first study to develop and practically test a generic implementation Green LSS framework.