Manufacturing system sustainability through lean and agile initiatives

ABSTRACT

Sustainability is one of the most critical issues facing manufacturers today. The industries must develop new and innovative approaches to ensure sustainability in economic, environmental and social aspects. The operational excellence strategies such as Lean and Agile manufacturing can be applied in the industries that add value to the product by eliminating waste and quickly respond to dynamic changes in demand. This paper presents a framework that builds and assesses the sustainability of the manufacturing system with combined lean and agile concepts. Analytical Hierarchy Process and Analytical Network Process are identified as suitable methodologies to analyze the model. The model is validated in an Ayurveda Pharmaceutical industry to identify the most important factors of lean and agile manufacturing that build and enable the sustainability dimensions such as Economic, Environmental, Social, Technological and Ethical. The results show that the industry focuses more on economic aspects of sustainability followed by social, environmental, ethics and technological dimensions of sustainability in the case of a lean perspective. For an agile perspective, the weightage is more for social dimension followed by ethics, economic, technological and environmental dimensions of sustainability.

KEYWORDS:

• Lean manufacturing
• agile manufacturing
• sustainability
• analytical network process
• pharmaceutical industry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vinay Venugopal

Vinay Venugopal is an alumnus of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, he completed his masters in manufacturing engineering from Amrita his areas of interests covers lean manufacturing,  agile manufacturing and supply chain management

P. G. Saleeshya

P.G. Saleeshya is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Amrita University, Coimbatore, India. She received the M.Tech & PhD degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (Agile Manufacturing) from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. Her areas of interest in teaching and research is mainly focused on operations strategy: agile manufacturing, lean manufacturing, lean six sigma, green design and manufacturing, and responsive supply chain, agility in textile industries. She got several publications in various international journals, and two book chapters