Back to Intuition: Proposal for a Performance Indicators Framework to Facilitate Eco-factories Management and Benchmarking

In the current competitive and regulated landscape, manufacturing enterprises struggle to improve their performances, encompassing environmental as well as economic objectives, towards sustainable manufacturing and the future Eco-factories. Experts and scholars have developed more and more indicators, usually referred to as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as a mean for steering and controlling the complex factory systems, characterized by dynamic interdependencies among different subsystems and external variables. The present study proposes a synthetic framework to bring back hundreds of environmental and economic KPIs to a few sound intuitive categories, in order to reduce duplications, recuperate meaningfulness and consciousness, facilitate inter and intra-organizational benchmarking. The approach, based on input-output modelling of physical flows (products, materials, energy, emissions, etc.) in manufacturing systems, can be used at different hierarchical levels in the plant and in different factory life-cycle phases (design, operations and re-design). The application of the framework is demonstrated on an extensive review of performance indicators gathered in industrial cases and in the literature.