The design of a sustainable manufacturing system: A case study of its importance to product variety manufacturing

A key challenge for manufacturers is to not only design but manufacture products using a sustainable approach. Manufacturing industries have started recognising that it is their responsibility to design a sustainable manufacturing system which has less environmental impact and social disruptions and promotes wealth. This paper presents a case for adapting current manufacturing system design methods to include environmental issues. A case study is presented which uses an environmental process selection method to demonstrate how companies can transform into sustainable practices in a large product variety environment. One of the key results is that the technology capability and economic risk are the two main factors which prevent a company to adopt sustainable manufacturing.

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Submitted by ramakumarj on Fri, 30/06/2006 - 7:40am.
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Product Variety

Submitted by iwilliams on Thu, 06/07/2006 - 10:31pm.

Hi Ramakumar,

Thank you for sharing your work with us through this medium. As you are aware the term sustainability is often associated with environmental issues. Do you think ranking of products variety according to their impacts on the environment can help highlight the implication of products variety on the environment?

Adebayo

Product Variety

Submitted by ramakumarj on Sun, 09/07/2006 - 3:52pm.

Abebayo, Thank you for your interest.

Ranking of any product based upon the environmental impact is highly difficult. For example in the paper presented we stated that material waste as an environmental impact in the traditional process, whilst in the alternative process the environmental impact is energy consumption, it is difficult to compare the environmental performance of these two process as they have different base.

There are not much of environmental indicators available to rank a product based on its environmental impact, this is due to the wide domain of the environmental issues such as emissions, material consumption, energy usage, ancillary material use etc.

Ranking of products variety according to their impacts on the environment is again a difficult task because each product may use different materials, processes and yield different emissions.

Process Selection

Submitted by iwilliams on Tue, 11/07/2006 - 6:43am.

Thank you for your reply. How can manufacturing organisations be encouraged to reduce environmental degradation through sustainable methodology of process selection as discussed in your work?

Thank you.

environmental incentives

Submitted by tony fouweather on Tue, 11/07/2006 - 10:28am.

Hello Ramakumar
some very interesting work presented in your paper.

Do you think that the only way to ensure organisations try to improve their processes in terms of environmental issues is to offer incentives (perhaps from governmet)?
Do you think that the managers of organisations would like to reduce environmental impacts without incentives? Or do you think they beleive its not their problem and is the responsibility of someone higher up?

Thank you
tony

Williams, Apologies for the

Submitted by ramakumarj on Mon, 17/07/2006 - 3:26pm.

Williams, Apologies for the delay in posting I have been traveling for the past few days.
The drive to reduce the environmental impacts was initiated by the legislation (such as command & control approaches, end of pipe solutions etc.), but in the past few years there has been more environmental awareness among the consumer over the environmental friendly products and customers are ready to pay more for products that has less environmental friendly. A recent example of this is the result published by BBC which surveyed UK consumers for their preference over environmental friendly personal computers, the findings (Accessed on June, 26th, 2006) state that on an average the consumers are ready to pay 109 GBP for environmental friendly PC’s.
It is also very difficult to state who drives the organisation to reduce the environmental impacts, the initiative was started by the legislation and currently it is driven by the cumulative effect of legislation, consumers, customers (suppliers are driven) stakeholders etc.
Though the alternative process shown in the case study is not preferred due to economic criteria, if the cumulative drive increases the altrernative process may be a viable option.
We have also conducted case studies among companies, which have won awards for environmental performance, the results show that the companies lack method to rank process alternatives based on the environmental impacts. If you need more information , I can post the details.
Sorry again for the late reply.

Thank you, Please see the

Submitted by ramakumarj on Mon, 17/07/2006 - 3:51pm.

Thank you,
Please see the earlier post for the driving forces for environmental performance improvements.

Incentives is not the only way to reduce the environmental impacts, incentives can often reduce impacts at a lower levels of the organisation structure such as shop floor level.(that’s what ISO 14000 aims to do, Control and manage the environmental impacts of the activities). For example let us consider that the product designers and product development team to develop products without environmental considerations, then there are lot of opportunities to reduce the environmental impacts, but currently many organisations design products considering environmental issues.
Environmental issues during the design of product is a must due to various driving forces. Organisations are driven by various forces (consumers, stakeholders, etc.) to reduce the environmental impacts, incentives my result in only subtle improvements, as most of the environmental decisions are driven by the driving forces and there is limited opportunity to improve environmental performance.

Incentives on the other hand may be a suitable option for organizations that has poor or desultory environmental performance.

The design of a sustainable manufacturing system: A case study of its importance to product variety manufacturing

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