A NOVEL SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK FOR MANUFACTURING COMPANIES

Nowadays one of the main challenges for manufacturing companies is to apply in their strategies and production decisions global criteria to produce sustainable and environmentally friendly products. Given these sustainability concerns, this work proposes a new tool for decision support in the management area, based on the use of a Sustainability Index Function (SIF). The novelty is based on developing a method of evaluation of all aspects of sustainability: environmental, economic and social in a simple and useful way, by feeding this simple function with data obtained from simulation of different production alternatives and aiding decision making with Multi Criteria tools to compose a complete and comprehensive methodology. The usefulness of proposed approach is demonstrated for the case of a simulated production line.