Assessing and improving sustainability in supply networks of manufacturing organizations

Abstract

Sustainability is a critical issue in supply networks that is going to affect the environment as well as the economy. Jobs in conventional manufacturing are at the risk of being lost owing to stricter environmental regulations the world over. India needs to promote sustainability in manufacturing all the more if it has to reap its demographic dividend. Adopting sustainability into supply networks of manufacturing organizations will lead to the implementation of state of the art technologies having lower carbon footprints in manufacturing, leading to products that are globally competitive and meet the strict environmental standards. Current supply networks of manufacturing organizations are not sustainable. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely used for the design of sustainable supply networks by environmental managers. In this research, our aim is to assess and improve sustainability in the supply networks of manufacturing organizations. In the first objective, we developed an LCA based framework to assess sustainability in supply networks of manufacturing organizations, to be tested in four case studies. Utilizing this framework, we identified environmental impact hotspots and then suggested green interventions to remove these hotspots. We performed four case studies to test this framework. The products chosen for the case studies were paracetamol tablet, rice-based pudding-kheer, bio implant, and hair dryer. The products were chosen based on their widespread use and environmental impact potential. The results of the study validated the effectiveness of the proposed sustainability assessment framework in the four case studies. The successful implementation this framework in these four case studies builds a case for wider application of this framework in more number of manufacturing organizations belonging to various industries and sectors. We also present reconfiguration case in the supply network of these four products, simulating the implementation of a suggested green intervention. Green interventions are scattered in the literature, and there is a need for a single trustworthy information support. Therefore in our second objective, we developed a software tool to suggest suitable green interventions that could be used to remove a given environmental impact hotspot in a supply network. Subsequent to finding the green interventions, there is also a need to rank the green interventions depending on how dominant they are. Therefore, in the third objective, we analyzed a set of green interventions implemented in supply networks and found the dominant green interventions. In the second part of this objective, we analyzed a green intervention for its implementation. The green intervention chosen for the analysis was ‘green supplier selection.’ The process of sustainability assessment and improvement in supply networks of manufacturing organizations is dependent on various factors. Therefore in the fourth objective, we identified and analyzed the factors hindering the implementation of sustainability (barriers) in supply networks as well as the factors which can overcome these barriers (drivers). This research has developed a comprehensive package for manufacturing organizations to assess and improve sustainability in their supply networks. We developed a holistic systematic approach through adoption of a multiple methodological approach. The holistic approach developed is appropriate for varied manufacturing industries. Small industries will find the framework more useful, as it will help to create a sustainability infrastructure at their plants without a lot of investment. Besides creating a life cycle inventory of data, the framework will also help create a sustainability ecosystem in the manufacturing organizations. The developed framework also enhances the scope of the analyses that can be done using life cycle analysis technique. The LCA based sustainability assessment framework is a key theoretical contribution of this research work, as it develops a analytical process framework to assess and improve sustainability in supply networks of manufacturing organizations. It presents a methodology that can be adopted by the manufacturing organizations with ease to assess and improve sustainability in their supply networks. The first part (objective 1) of this work provides an LCA based sustainability assessment framework. The manufacturing organizations can use it to find the environmental impact hotspots in the supply networks of their products. The data generation done in the course of application of the LCA based sustainability assessment framework is a significant research contribution of this work, as the data generated is novel and will assist in future environmental sustainability assessment studies. The second part (objective 2) provides software support to search and find green interventions to remove the environmental impact hotspots. In the third part (objective 3) of the work, we developed an interpretive structure modelling method based framework to prioritize the green interventions. The companies can use the framework to find the most effective green interventions among a set of interventions. The fourth part (objective 4) of the work provides a hybrid fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution framework (TOPSIS), which the companies can use to rank the top drivers to sustainability implementation. FAHP approach alone can only provide the weights of different criteria and sub-criteria but cannot rank the alternatives. Therefore, it requires an additional approach to rank the alternatives. The reason behind using a combination of FAHP and FTOPSIS is that it is a stablished approach for analyzing the different criteria and alternatives to find the concrete results. However, the novelty of this study lies in the fact that this approach has not been used so far to analyze the supply chain barriers and the drivers to eliminate these barriers. The sustainability managers can use the identified drivers to their advantage to accelerate the implementation of sustainability.