Kestävän arvon muodostuminen teollisissa prosesseissa

Sustainability and sustainable development, understood to include economic, environmental and societal aspects, are receiving even more attention. Companies are facing ever growing pressure to modify their operations to fit sustainable development. Academic literature offers various models and methods to be used in industry to enhance the sustainability of companies’ operations. The objective was to create new knowledge on how sustainable value is created as a part of industrial processes. What are the tools, indicators and actions used in the sustainability work? How can an external service provider assist in sustainable value creation? The main research question was: How is sus-tainable value formed in industrial processes? Research design was a multiple case study, and two case companies were selected by a service provider that is a partner company in this study. The two cases are Finnish process industry companies. Data for the study was collected through interviews, observations and informal discussion with the case companies and through workshop meetings with the service provider. The interviews were completed as semi-structured to ensure rich and extensive answers. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded. The coded interviews were analyzed with ATLAS.ti computer program to ensure systematical analysis. The results of each case were discussed in a workshop meeting with the service provider. The results indicate that companies have understood the threefold nature of sustainability. Reasons to operate sustainably include customers’ demand, law and regulations, and competition. Value of sustainability is a complex issue, and case companies had no difficulties in mentioning benefits of sustainable operations to all related stakeholders. Quite surprisingly, tools and methods are not used in identifying and assessing of sustainable value. All studied functions (strategic level, R&D, manufacturing, marketing) were identified to have many actions that can foster sustainable development. However, in R&D the actions are based more on common sense than on any clear set of actions. External service providers are used as part of sustainable value creation, and one of the case companies had been able to reach significant sustainability benefits from an industrial symbiosis formed with a service provider. Customers should ensure that enough resources are allocated to integrating the service provider into the operations. The service provider should take a leading role when needed and take care of a specific set of issues at a time, instead of trying to do it all at once

The Integration of Energy, Environment and Health Policies in China: A Review

The goal of sustainable development is far from being achieved in China. In this context, this paper aims to provide an overview of China’s energy, environment and health policies over the past 30 years and discuss whether the previous policies have fully integrated the energy, environment and health issues in its sustainable development agenda. From the overview, we observe that the energy policies accelerating energy industrial upgrading, stimulating development of new energy sources, deregulating energy pricing mechanism, promoting energy saving and seizing the opportunity of green growth are conducive to an improvement of environmental conditions and public health in China. However, the environmental policies are not effectively implemented and subsequently they could not succeed in reducing environmental risks on public health and putting pressure on enterprises to efficiently use energy. The health policies have not taken real actions to focus with any specificity on energy-induced or pollution-induced health problems

Lean, agile, resilient and green supply chain management interoperability assessment methodology

Dissertação para obtenção de grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MEGI)Supply Chain Management has become a tactic asset for the current global competition situation. Innovative strategies such as Lean, Agile, Resilient and Green emerged as a response, requiring high levels of cooperation and of great complexity. However, the strategic alignment of operations with partners in supply chains is affected by lack of interoperability. The present work provides a framework to enhance SC competitiveness and performance by assessing interoperable SCM Practices applied in automotive industry. Through a pragmatic interoperability approach, this methodology describes in detail the form of application using analytical hierarchical process (AHP) and Fuzzy sets as support decision making models, ensuring a systematic approach to the analysis of interoperability with appropriate criteria for assessment of situations that require high levels of collaboration between partners. Through a case study in a Portuguese automaker, it was possible to test the methodology and analyse which areas lack interoperability in the implementation of SCM practices

Multidimensional project control system

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