Enablers for Improving Environmental Performance of Manufacturing Operations

This paper establishes how organizations can overcome barriers to sustain manufacturing environmental performance improvement. There is a growing body of knowledge on energy and resource efficiency, but there is a gap in how to counter barriers to enable technical and financial success. In this paper, barriers to energy efficiency adoption established from the literature are identified from 100 short-term manufacturing operations projects across 11 European plants over a three-year period. The longitudinal examination of multiple projects provides research insight absent from the literature that could be used by companies to enhance the outcomes of their improvement programs. Learning from early projects resulted in interventions to enable reduction in environmental impact and cost. The contribution of this research is the identification of enablers to sustain energy efficiency advancement of vision, objectives, operational responsibility, methods, training, people, community, equipment, and data. This paper has potential to better explain how organizational enablers mitigate barriers to environmental efficiency adoption to in turn reduce impact and to reduce cost.