Modelling and Tactics for Sustainable Manufacturing: An Improvement Methodology

Sustainable manufacturing practices demonstrated by companies are a key ingredient to increasing business performance and competitiveness. Whilst reported practices are good examples of what has been achieved, they are often company specific and difficult for others to reproduce since they provide few, if any, details on how improvements were achieved. Sustainable manufacturing strategies offer insight to the overall approach taken by companies but they can lack practical support for implementation. This paper examines the gap between strategic direction and practices to extract the mechanisms behind the practices and formulate sustainable manufacturing tactics (which provide information on how specific improvements can be implemented). The research is based on extensive collection and analysis of available case studies in published literature and interaction with industry. The combined use of resource flow (material, energy and waste) modelling and the tactics can support manufacturers in their journey towards sustainability by providing generic solutions on how to adapt their operations. An improvement methodology is developed by combining the manufacturing ecosystem model and tactics to guide manufacturers in a structured and systematic way to identify improvement opportunities. The paper explores the design challenge of developing such an improvement methodology to assist users in identifying which tactics might apply in their specific context.