Evaluation and Improvement Sustainability in Manufacturing Organizations

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Industrial system engineering department, MSA University

Abstract

Sustainability is the ability of businesses to utilize the resources found in nature in a manner that the environmental, economic, and social elements of industrial activities are minimized. Manufacturing firms are expected to include the three dimensions of sustainability in their activities and plans while maintaining a dynamic balance between them. Therefore, manufacturing organizations have to adopt several models for evaluating and measuring their degree of sustainability. This paper will present an outline for measuring the degree of sustainability in manufacturing businesses. Empirical work is carried out by using the proposed framework in an organization that manufactures plastic irrigation pipes to analyze the primary issues linked with sustainability dimensions and its indicators for identifying areas for development. Three major challenges have been identified that require adjustment in order to increase the organization's degree of sustainability. The first issue is reducing the wasted water used in plastic washing tanks by recycling water. The second issue is reducing human errors and risk by adding a safety shutdown mechanism for plastic shredding machines. The third issue is removing the bottlenecks from the production line by upgrading perforator and insertion machines. Re-assessment is carried out to monitor the achieved level of sustainability. The results showed that the implemented improvements greatly impact increasing the company's sustainability indices. The environmental sustainability index increased by 20.60%, social sustainability increased by 3.59%, and the economic sustainability index increased by 5.13%. The company's total sustainability index has increased by 5.95%.

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