Sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation tool for automotive companies

Abstract

In response to the growing sustainability concerns, manufacturing companies have to formulate a set of measures to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance, aimed at integration of sustainability aspects. Sustainability is generally evaluated by dimensions of environment, economic, and social, known as the triple bottom line (TBL) of sustainability. However, while the literature on sustainability is rapidly growing, only few studies have attempted to integrate sustainability into manufacturing performance evaluation. There is also no consensus yet on a standard set of sustainable manufacturing performance measures. This study aims to integrate sustainability into manufacturing performance by incorporating manufacturing performance measures with sustainable manufacturing measures. As a result, a set of initial measures for sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation believed to be suitable for automotive companies have been proposed, consisting of three factors divided into nine dimensions and a total of 41 subdimensions. In order to validate the initial measures with industry practices, a survey was conducted on the automotive companies in Malaysia. It was found that all the initial measures are highly important and thus proposed as the key measures of sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation for automotive companies. A sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation tool for automotive companies was then developed using a hybrid Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique. Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) methodology was applied to determine the structural relationships and inter-relationships amongst all the performance measures and Analytic Network Process (ANP) methodology was employed to determine the important weights of each of the performance measures by summarizing the opinions of the experts. While the tool provides a systematic approach for quantitative assessment of sustainable manufacturing performance, it is not entirely automated. Thus, for that purpose, a software-based tool named SUSMAP was subsequently developed using PHP and MySQL. Two case studies have been conducted to validate the tool. Results from the case studies suggested that the SUSMAP is easy to use and applicable to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance in automotive companies. The tool can be used by companies for self-assessment as well as benchmarking. It shows the existing performance level on strengths and weaknesses, and where improvements need to be made. It is hoped that the proposed sustainable manufacturing performance measures and the associated SUSMAP tool can aid the automotive companies to achieve successful implementation of sustainable manufacturing so as to compete in a much more sustainable manner