Sustainable-value stream mapping to evaluate sustainability performance: case study in an Indonesian furniture company

Abstract

Lean manufacturing tools do not consider environmental and societal benefits. The conventional value stream mapping (VSM) methodology examines the economics of a manufacturing line, most of which are in regards to time (cycle time, lead time, change-out time, etc.). Incorporating the capability to capture environmental and societal performance visually through VSMs will increase its usefulness as a tool that can be used to assess manufacturing operations from a sustainability perspective. A number of studies have addressed the extension of VSM to incorporate additional criteria. A vast majority of these efforts have focused on adding energy-related metrics to VSMs, while several other studies refer to ‘sustainable’ VSM by including environmental performance in conventional VSMs. This research has developed a method for VSM integrated with environment metric and social metric for ensuring sustainable manufacture. The proposed technique is capable of visualizing and evaluating manufacturing process performance from sustainability view point. The capability of proposed technique has been tested by an application study on furniture company. The study provides insights to practitioners to visualize process performance in economic, environment and social metric.