Abstract
Manufacturing plays a major role in the economic and social development of society, yet this often comes at a high environmental cost. Despite great advances in our understanding of sustainability issues and solutions developed to tackle this challenge, current production and consumption models are still largely unsustainable. Strong industrial actions are required to move towards safer and cleaner practices respectful of the planetary boundaries. This paper puts forward a novel approach for top and middle management in manufacturing companies to build capabilities for sustainable manufacturing by assessing their organisational sustainability readiness. The proposed model and tool for organisational sustainability readiness were developed based on themes emerging from empirical data collected via interviews and focus groups in six companies. The resulting themes were consolidated and validated with relevant literature to create four levels of readiness, displaying a crescendo of operations management practices on the shop floor that positively affect sustainability performance. Finally, an industrial application was used to further validate the tool and demonstrate how it can help companies develop a roadmap for a more sustainable manufacturing industry.
Highlights
Sustainability is a multi-faceted concept, with institutional, economic, social, and environmental dimensions (Elkington, 1997; Spangenberg, 2002)
The number of maturity models in the engineering field has grown dramatically since the 1990s, as evidenced by a review of 52 models by von Wangenheim et al (2010) and another review of 237 articles on maturity models by Wendler (2012). The latter claimed that theoretical-reflective publications evaluating and validating maturity models are scarce. With this knowledge gap in mind, this paper focuses on implementing a specific type of capability maturity model (CMM) and assessing its usefulness
This research focused on sustainable manufacturing capabilities
Summary
Sustainability is a multi-faceted concept, with institutional, economic, social, and environmental dimensions (Elkington, 1997; Spangenberg, 2002). Sustainable production can only be achieved when manufacturing processes account for future needs of society and work within the planetary boundaries (Rockstro€m et al, 2009). Production environments are currently undergoing a transformation induced by the fourth industrial revolution, which adds complexity and opportunities for sustainable manufacturing. Production systems are transitioning to cyber-physical production systems (CPPS), where the virtual and physical worlds converge (Monostori, 2014) and the value of data is harnessed to achieve desired goals. As Tao et al (2018) pointed out, the lack of convergence between the virtual and the physical worlds leads “to low level of efficiency, intelligence, sustainability in product design, manufacturing, and service phases”. Approaches, technologies and methods are needed to reconcile these two worlds and support relevant strategic goals for the manufacturing industry, sustainability included
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