Measuring the Sustainability of a Manufacturing Process: A Conceptual Framework

Recently, besides recurrent financial gains, industries have been required to boost their environmental and social performance to fulfil the demands of several stakeholders. Moreover, the need to measure the sustainability of manufacturing processes is recognized because the production and operations managers need to know how they are contributing to the triple bottom line of their respective companies. To do that, many initiatives have been developed although all of them face some limitations: (a) they are only appropriate for the company as a whole, which makes their application for a manufacturing process difficult; (b) they consider the measures for sustainability (economic, environmental and social) as separate variables with no integration among them, which could become a methodological difficulty in case indicators move in different directions; or (c) they are too complicated to be used as a practical tool on the factory floor. Hence, this study proposes a framework to evaluate the sustainability level of a manufacturing process, integrating the economic, environmental, and social variables into a single combined measure. A case study exemplifies how the proposed procedure can be applied in real-world situations.