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Abstract
Sustainable Value Stream Mapping (Sus-VSM) builds upon traditional VSM to capture additional sustainability aspects of the product flow, such as environmental and societal aspects. This paper presents research to expand the utility of Sus-VSM to supply chain networks. Metrics are identified to assess economic, environmental, and societal sustainability for supply chain networks while maintaining congruency with process level Sus-VSM when feasible. Visual symbols are developed to represent metrics in the supply chain Sus-VSM to allow users to identify locations where sustainability can be improved. Discrete event simulation (DES) modeling is applied for a case scenario to develop future state maps, allowing for quicker assessment and identification of improvement areas. This information is used to identify potential sustainability improvements and develop future-state Sus-VSM. These future-states are modeled with DES to assess the impact of improvements and change strategies, if needed, to achieve desired sustainability performance. Future work includes the use of DES to further analyze Sus-VSM results.
Keywords
Sustainable manufacturing, value stream mapping, supply chain evaluation, Sus-VSM
1. Introduction
In an effort to identify and reduce waste in manufacturing operations, traditional value stream mapping (VSM) was developed as a lean manufacturing tool to visualize the production line. Using VSM allows companies to more easily determine the sources of waste in the production line and focus kaizen improvement efforts, resulting in a more efficient manufacturing system. As society moves beyond lean manufacturing to sustainable manufacturing, however, the need for a more advanced tool has become more pressing. Efforts have been made to build upon VSM and develop a mapping tool that captures the sustainability of a manufacturing system. The result of those efforts was sustainable value stream mapping (Sus-VSM), which retains the features of VSM while adding metrics that capture the environmental and societal aspects of sustainability [1].
However, both traditional VSM and Sus-VSM focus on the process level of manufacturing, and are used within a single manufacturing plant. As companies have used VSM and other techniques to establish a lean environment within their manufacturing plants, they have sought to extend that lean culture to the rest of their supply chain [2]. Developing a lean culture throughout the entire supply chain simultaneously would be an exceedingly difficult task, so it becomes necessary to identify locations...