Sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation at the enterprise level: Index- And value-based methods

Sustainability is a key principle that has been intensely discussed over the past two decades. In this context, sustainable manufacturing, which involves the use of sustainable processes and systems to produce more sustainable products, is becoming increasingly important for corporate success. Companies that compete globally are increasingly required to commit to and report on the overall sustainability performance of operational initiatives. While a variety of performance evaluation methods have been presented in literature, for sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation at the enterprise level, none comprehensively cover the three pillars of sustainability, embrace the total life-cycle perspective, or consider the 6Rs of reduce, reuse, recover, redesign, and remanufacture simultaneously. In this paper, two alternate index-based and value-based methods were proposed to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance at the enterprise level to comprehensively consider all the previously mentioned aspects. A sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation framework was used to identify enterprise sustainability metrics which are then converted to an index with a five-level hierarchical process. The same metrics were then used to propose a value-based measure for enterprise level sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation. Application of these two methods were illustrated for a representative enterprise producing consumer electronics to compare and analyze performance over a four year period. The two methods provide comparable results, indicating either can be used to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance at the enterprise level in manufacturing organizations. The assessment methods also provide insights for future studies that can further explore sustainability metrics and evaluation methods for other levels across the supply chain.