Integrating sustainability indicators and Lean Manufacturing to assess manufacturing processes: Application case studies in Brazilian industry

Operation management models have been developed according to changes in society's demands, such as better working conditions, clean production, recyclable and reusable products, and improving social conditions. Thus, new challenges in developing sustainable management models, particularly for manufacturing processes, have emerged. Lean Manufacturing and Value Stream Mapping (VSM) have been widely used to develop manufacturing processes without wastes in the production flow. However, current indicators of the VSM tool have not identified the economic, social and environmental factors. This work aims to propose a conceptual method to integrate a new group of sustainability indicators into the VSM tool to assess manufacturing processes. The development of sustainability indicators was performed through analysis of the assessment models of sustainability and sustainability indicators in the period of 2009-2014. The method was applied in three case studies, and the results demonstrated that the proposed method identified different levels of sustainability of manufacturing processes and thus enabled the development of improved scenarios. In this sense, the results contributed to the literature with the proposition of new sustainability indicators related to the manufacturing process. The case studies enabled evaluation of the interaction of a new group of sustainability indicators in different manufacturing processes.