Sustainability Cockpit: An integrated tool for continuous assessment and improvement of sustainability in manufacturing

Abstract

Sustainability assessment needs to be embedded into manufacturers’ daily operations for continuous improvement. Existing factories, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs), often lack infrastructure and capital to enable such regular assessment. An integrated tool has been developed based on a generic discrete event simulation (DES) factory model, which is linked to the company's resource planning system in order to not only assess the sustainability performance of each company's as-is operations, but also optimise their future performance. An Australian company was used as a case study to demonstrate the validity of the tool.