Measuring the Sustainability of a Manufacturing Process: A Conceptual Framework

Wagner Cezar Lucato, José Carlos da Silva Santos and Athos Paulo Tadeu Pacchini
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Wagner Cezar Lucato: Industrial Engineering Post Graduation Program, Universidade Nove de Julho, São Paulo 01504-001, Brazil
José Carlos da Silva Santos: Industrial Engineering Post Graduation Program, Universidade Nove de Julho, São Paulo 01504-001, Brazil
Athos Paulo Tadeu Pacchini: Industrial Engineering Post Graduation Program, Universidade Nove de Julho, São Paulo 01504-001, Brazil

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Recently, besides recurrent financial gains, industries have been required to boost their environmental and social performance to fulfil the demands of several stakeholders. Moreover, the need to measure the sustainability of manufacturing processes is recognized because the production and operations managers need to know how they are contributing to the triple bottom line of their respective companies. To do that, many initiatives have been developed although all of them face some limitations: (a) they are only appropriate for the company as a whole, which makes their application for a manufacturing process difficult; (b) they consider the measures for sustainability (economic, environmental and social) as separate variables with no integration among them, which could become a methodological difficulty in case indicators move in different directions; or (c) they are too complicated to be used as a practical tool on the factory floor. Hence, this study proposes a framework to evaluate the sustainability level of a manufacturing process, integrating the economic, environmental, and social variables into a single combined measure. A case study exemplifies how the proposed procedure can be applied in real-world situations.

Keywords: sustainability; manufacturing process; conceptual framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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