A FRAMEWORK AND METRICS FOR SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AT THE PRODUCTION LINE, PLANT AND ENTERPRISE LEVELS

Sustainable manufacturing is becoming increasingly important due to scarcity of natural resources, stricter regulations and increasing customer demand for sustainable products. Sustainable manufacturing involves the use of sustainable processes and systems to produce more sustainable products. In order to meet these demands for sustainable products, manufacturing companies have to adopt numerous strategies to achieve sustainable manufacturing. The approach for evaluating sustainable products and processes have been investigated in previous work where product/process sustainability indices were proposed. However, no comprehensive methods are available for sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation at the system level. This work aims to develop two alternate methods for evaluating sustainable manufacturing performance at enterprise, plant and production line levels. First, requirements for a sustainability metrics framework are identified through studying and reviewing existing literature where the three pillars of sustainability, total life-cycle stages, and 6R concepts are concurrently addressed. Then index-and value-based methods are proposed to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance by conducting assessment on economic, environmental and societal aspects. Finally, the application of these two methods is illustrated for a representative enterprise producing consumer electronics at the enterprise level; a case study for a satellite television dish production is used to demonstrate the application of these methods at the production line level. Results obtained from these two methods are compared and analyzed at the enterprise level. The proposed methods can provide information to a company to identify improvement strategies and for decision making for sustainable development