Decision analysis on sustainable manufacturing practices: cross country perspective

Abstract

Increasing concerns about climate change and waste management pressure manufacturers to innovate their practices, focusing on the environment and society without impacting the economic returns. Such concerns brought a new realm to manufacturing, sustainable manufacturing, which is a combination of economy, environment and society. Though several studies have attempted to integrate sustainability in manufacturing successfully, very few studies have been reported on sustainable manufacturing practices. Even these existing studies failed to explore the difference between implementing sustainable manufacturing in different geographical contexts. To fill this gap, this study considers four different geographical context Saudi Arabia, India, Peru and China to understand their preferences of achieving sustainable development in manufacturing through sustainable manufacturing practices. At first, common sustainable manufacturing practices were collected from literature and the same has been evaluated with case industries from Saudi Arabia, India, Peru and China. Totally 15 practices under three different dimensions have been considered in this study. From the obtained results, it can be confounded that “Integrate efficient technologies into core manufacturing system” (SP4) has been identified as key influential practices irrespective of the considered geographies. With the enlighten of these obtained results, practitioners and researchers can understood various in-depth insights on how different nations following different strategies for implementing sustainable development in manufacturing sector. Such clarity improves inhouse policy making which leads to better decision making for faster transition towards sustainable manufacturing.