Production flow analysis through environmental value stream mapping: a case study of cover glass manufacturing facility

Due to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, the touchscreen display market is expected to show a remarkable growing rate in the coming years. The large amount of profits come along with energy consumption and waste generation. Previous facility planning studies aimed to help decision makers arrive at an optimal solution in terms of cost and productivity. Given finite resources, facility planning should not only focus on cost reduction and productivity improvement, but also environmental impacts. This paper studies the application of environmental value steam map (E-VSM) in a cover glass production facility. Manufacturing data were collected from a cover glass manufacturer in China during December 2015. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of the current facility design using E-VSM method, and present several strategies to reduce the energy consumption and production costs. Furthermore, a case study of cover glass manufacturing facility is presented to show that the implementation of environmentally lean strategies resulted in the reduction of both the production costs and emissions. (C) 2017 The Authors Published by Elsevier B.V.