An approach for steering products and services offering variety towards economic and environmental sustainability

Abstract

International audienceCustomers’ individual preferences are calling for greater variety of firms’ offerings. Faced with this situation, firms endeavour to meet customer requirements while reducing their costs and impact on the environment to remain competitive. The attainment of these goals entails various issues that must be addressed including multiple performance drivers and criteria relating to environmental and economic sustainability and variety. Accordingly, trade-offs must be defined and balanced among such heterogeneous criteria to facilitate the decision-making process on a variety of levels regarding environmental and economic sustainability. These trade-offs should involve decision makers to reflect the firm's priorities and consider its business field. This paper proposes an approach supporting the decision-making process on offering variety to the market while considering environmental and economic sustainability criteria. More specifically, the approach uses economic and environmental performance indicators and inputs from decision makers to determine the variety of the offering to meet a given demand. The paper highlights the impact of variety steering on environmental and economic sustainability indicators

An Analysis of Research Trends in the Sustainability of Production Planning

“…They introduced a coherence between production planning presented by lot-sizing and preventive maintenance. Customer Satisfaction [53] Scheduling [7] Lot sizing [50] Other [2] Scheduling [49] Routing [16] Hybrid [69] Hybrid [70] Dispatching [71] Scheduling [47] Hybrid [15] Hybrid [72] Hybrid [31] Aggregate production planning [73] Hybrid [74] Hybrid [75] Dispatching [76] Hybrid [77] Hybrid [78] Hybrid [79] Holistic approach [80] Holistic approach [81] Other [82] Scheduling [83] Scheduling [84] Scheduling [85] Other * Hybrid, more than one production planning problem used, and production planning problem combined with other planning processes; ** Other, other planning operations such as energy planning and shipment planning.…”

“…Afterwards, these consumption values were employed to calculate the energy demands for better and efficient planning. Medini and Boucher [80] aimed at balancing forecasted sales and volumes produced in a diverse manufacturing environment while considering environmental and economic sustainability indicators. Thus, they introduced the impact of product diversity on environmental and economic sustainability indicators.…”

“…Integration (economic and environmental) Hybrid [77] Germany Integration (economic, environmental and social) Hybrid [78] U.A.E. Integration (economic and environmental) Hybrid [80] France Integration (economic and environmental) Holistic approach [81] Germany Integration (economic and environmental) Other [84] China Integration (economic and environmental) Scheduling [85] China Integration (economic and environmental) Other…”

An ontology supported risk assessment approach for the intelligent configuration of supply networks

“…Organisations need to change traditional approaches to undertaking business, they must become more agile, more sensitive to the pace of change and aware of other factors that influence their operations, not just locally, but globally too. This applies to aspects such as the technological rate of change, economic issues and environmental sustainability and impact (Doualle et al 2015;Hussain et al 2016;Medini and Boucher 2016;Schmidt et al 2015;Sousa-Zomer and Miguel 2016). Evermore legislation is being enforced both at national and global levels to promote and influence attitudes towards the environment and sustainability.…”