Towards an Effective Approach to Reduce Environmental Burdens via Process Planning

Abstract

In order for companies to attain greater reductions in environmental burdens during manufacturing operations, they need to consider environmental aspects during their initial product development stages. This places an additional burden on designers and process engineers who already need to meet multiple objectives within tight constraints. Consequently, environmental aspects are rarely considered in their decision making process. Thus, if environmentally conscious decisions are to be made, the utilization of existing information must be maximized. In response to this problem we propose an approach for storing and reusing environmentally-related process information of similar component process plans via environmental process model templates. These templates will contain standard environmental information and models associated with manufacturing operations and thus should effectively support environmentally conscious decisions in component process planning and eventually design. We illustrate how the templates can be developed for a gear process planning example.

A Synergetic Framework for Green and Lean Manufacturing Practices in SMEs: Saudi Arabia Perspective

“…Environmental performance can be evaluated in terms of the efficiency of a company to reduce the environmental footprint throughout the entire product life cycle. Although this is an objective that can be reached by applying green practices, lean practices can help towards generating a proper organisational culture and a suitable working environment, allowing for a more efficient implementation of such green practices and enhancing their results [6,7,9,10,57]. In this context, lean practices can act as moderating factors towards reaching further improvements, since lean employees are empowered, being more willing to adopt different and new practices, while lean working places and processes are more flexible, making it easier to modify them.…”