Environmental Decision Support for Manufacturing Technology Selection

Companies that are seeking to improve their environmental performance have a challenge in reconciling high level goals and practical decision making at the working level. To address this challenge companies need to develop key environmental metrics from high level goals and cascade them through all levels of management decision making. One decision-making level of interest in manufacturing involves manufacturing technology selection (MTS), which entails evaluating existing and new technologies of current operations in order to select the “best” technology that improves the performance of the company. Thus, in order to support environmentally conscious selection of technologies, key environmental metrics that may not be considered in this MTS process need to be identified throughout various decision-making levels and cascaded to the MTS decision-making level in a systematic fashion. Once these key environmental metrics are identified they should be incorporated in some tool to truly support the user in the selection process. In this paper, a systematic approach is presented for enabling companies to incorporate environmental decision support that is consistent with their high level goals into their MTS processes. To illustrate how the approach works, we conceptually apply the approach to an automotive company and evaluate the value of the approach and metrics encountered. We end with a summary and some potential research avenues.