Towards a Multidisciplinary Approach on Creating Value: Sustainability through the Supply Chain and ERP Systems

Abstract

Abstract:Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) is a widely used approach through manufacturing environments in a variety of sectors. With a tendency to go to specialized, smaller lot sizes in several industries (e.g., the pharmaceutical sector), companies are dealing with capacity bottlenecks if the planning rhythm wheel is not well calibrated or when production lines are not flexible enough in terms of changeover (C/O) and set-up times (S/U) (OEE is too small). A well-established communication system including other enterprise resources or production factors (e.g., Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP) is favorable to any extent. More and more questions arise from stakeholder communities and end-users on whether or not supply chains and manufacturing environments are sustainable and safe. Departments such as Environmental Health, Safety & Sustainability (EHS & S) and Product Stewardship are too often at the "blind" side of the ICT interface. When it comes to product and organizational sustainability, data seems to be lacking in order to conduct sustainability assessments proficiently. Years of intensive research and experience proved that primary data to perform sustainability assessments often are measured through equipment control sensors (e.g., flow rates, temperatures, etc.) and sent to PLCs and many other systems. Nevertheless, these data measurements are in many cases simply not penetrating through the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) because these bottom-up engineering data seems to be of little value to planning, procurement, etc. This communication paper deals with how sustainability assessments can be embedded in business operational management systems. After all, who does not want a "live Carbon Footprint" for process improvements and external sustainability reporting instead of a series of expensive resource consuming studies of 4 to 6 months digging into data logs in traditional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)? This communication paper has taken one step further in coupling business ERP systems with environmental sustainability of products, services and enterprises.

Approaching Green BPM characterisation

“…The idea of proposing or using a framework that contains a standardised set of concepts, practices, and criteria that will serve as a reference with which to integrate sustainability into business process management has been recurrent since the appearance of the first works linked to this subject …”

“…The authors classify the works in accordance with the subjects that they tackle: Green IT, Green IS, business process, BPM, sustainable, and sustainability. The 108 works associated with BPM and sustainability are subdivided into those that have a clear approach as regards the combination of both terms (8), show some kind of connection between Green IT and/or BPM (34), and mention only sustainability, Green IT, and/or BPM (59), although they do not provide details on the specific contributions that these studies make. They also evaluate the development of standards as extensions of modelling languages used in business process management, concluding that this is an open line of research.…”

“…We, therefore, eventually obtained a set of 56 primary studies, which will be analysed in the following subsections.…”

Sustainable Overall Throughputability Effectiveness (S.O.T.E.) as a Metric for Production Systems

“…Other works have pointed to analyze sustainability in logistics and supply chains structures [21,22]. Another paper that deals with sustainability in supply chains was reported by De Soete [23]. In that work, the author suggests mechanisms to embed sustainability attribute into business operational management systems, such as Material Requirement Planning (MRP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) software.…”

The Evolution of Digital Transformations: A Literature Review

“…In addition to cloud computing, in an effort to reduce waste within operations, the supply chain community instituted Lean initiatives over the past decade which were also integrated into ERP applications (De Soete, 2016). In an effort to develop a tool to track sustainable processes, researchers have begun to call these new applications Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning (S-ERP) applications.…”