A complex system approach to sustainable manufacturing organizations

Manufacturing organisations are becoming increasingly complex as they face environmental pressures from a diverse variety of internal and external sources, such as: governments, regulators, customers, suppliers, employees and stakeholders. Responding to these pressures, many manufacturing organisations have implemented environmental management systems (EMS) such as ISO 14001. However, they have not responded to these pressures to the same extent, or necessarily in the same way. Environmental management systems have been claimed as a panacea that deliver the concept of organisational sustainability. Taking a system approach which treats a manufacturing organisation as a complex dynamic system [1], this paper argues that EMS approach to sustainability is not consistent with a manufacturing systems approach to sustainability and it attempts to highlight the problems and limitations of current environmental management systems in delivering organisation sustainability. This paper aims to bring an insight into what sustainability means and how manufacturing organisations can achieve sustainability in short term as well as the long term.