Metrics-based approach to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance at the production line and plant levels

Promoting sustainability in manufacturing is becoming increasingly important due to the scarce natural resources, stricter regulations and increasing customer demand for more sustainable products. In order to meet this demand for sustainable products, manufacturing companies have to adopt numerous strategies for sustainable manufacturing through the use of more sustainable processes and systems. To improve performance of any domain, it must first be measured comprehensively. Approaches for evaluating sustainability performance of products and processes have been investigated in previous work where comprehensive product/process sustainability indices are proposed. While numerous studies address the topic, no comprehensive methods are available for sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation at the system level, particularly at the production line and plant levels. To address this gap, this paper presents an index-based method for comprehensively evaluating sustainable manufacturing performance at the production line and plant levels. First, existing literature have been studied and reviewed thoroughly. Then a set of comprehensive sustainability metrics have been identified and proposed for production line and plant levels, respectively, where the three pillars of sustainability, total life-cycle stage emphasis, and 6R concepts are concurrently addressed. These proposed metrics are organized into five-level hierarchy (metric, sub-cluster, cluster, sub-index, index) where lower level items are consolidated to the higher level. Then index-based methods are proposed to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance at the production line (LiSI) and plant (PlaSI) levels. Finally, the application of the proposed method is illustrated for a satellite television dish manufacturing company at the production line level.