Manufacturing Sustainability Evaluation Through Sustainable Value Stream Mapping (Sus-VSM): Approach and Case Study

A holistic view that spans product design, manufacturing processes and the entire supply chain is necessary to enhance sustainability in manufacturing. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is an important technique used in lean manufacturing to identify and visualize waste from a purely economic perspective. However, the environmental or societal performance of production lines, required for the assessment of sustainable manufacturing, is not considered in conventional VSM. Incorporating the ability to visually capture environmental and societal performance through VSM will increase its usefulness as a tool to assess manufacturing sustainability. Sustainable VSM (Sus-VSM) is an extension of VSM developed to provide these advantages. This presentation will detail the development of the Sus-VSM methodology and its application to a highly customized, low volume dispenser cathode assembly manufacturing line. The usefulness of the tool in assessing and visualizing sustainability performance as well as approaches to address the limitations will be presented.