Combining Sustainable Value Stream Mapping and simulation to assess supply chain performance

Sustainable Value Stream Mapping (Sus-VSM) builds upon traditional VSM to capture additional sustainability aspects of the product flow, such as environmental and societal aspects. This paper presents research to expand the utility of Sus-VSM to supply chain networks. Metrics are identified to assess economic, environmental, and societal sustainability for supply chain networks while maintaining congruency with process level Sus-VSM when feasible. Visual symbols are developed to represent metrics in the supply chain Sus-VSM to allow users to identify locations where sustainability can be improved. Discrete event simulation (DES) modeling is applied for a case scenario to develop future state maps, allowing for quicker assessment and identification of improvement areas. This information is used to identify potential sustainability improvements and develop future-state Sus-VSM. These future-states are modeled with DES to assess the impact of improvements and change strategies, if needed, to achieve desired sustainability performance. Future work includes the use of DES to further analyze Sus-VSM results.