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ScienceDirect Procedia CIRP 26 (2015) 64 – 69
12th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing
Sustainability Awareness in Industrial Organizations Ibrahim H. Garbie Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman and Department of Mechanical Engineering at Helwan, Helwan University, Helwan, Cairo, Egypt * Corresponding author. Tel.: +968-9810-6652; fax: +0-968-2414-1316. E-mail address:
[email protected] or
[email protected]
Abstract The main goal of this paper is to explore new an approach to measure the degree or percentage of sustainability awareness in industrial organizations. This evaluation was be conducted through in-depth interviews with main stakeholders and the assessment approach was developed in theoretical concept and its applicability was directly tested in one small and medium-sized industrial organization. The designed questionnaire will be distributed among stakeholders and the collected data will be analyzed and discussed individual and aggregated. A real life case study will be used to illustrate the proposed approach of estimating the degree of awareness, and the new assessment approach can be used as a template to assess the current state of awareness in industrial organizations. The results show that the awareness of sustainability is different from one stakeholder to another.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review Universität Berlin. underresponsibility responsibilityofofAssembly AssemblyTechnology Technologyand andFactory FactoryManagement/Technische Management/Technische Universität Berlin. Peer-review under Keywords: assessment, awareness, sustainability
1. Introduction The value of sustainability awareness can be measured by realization of utilizing knowledge and facts. This value consists of a variety of ways to identify how, why, and to what degree stakeholders understanding the concept of sustainability and its dimensions [1]. While industrialists (e.g., practitioners) understand the term of sustainability very well, this term itself proved to be difficult when used in society. This often enhances the confusion around “sustainability”. Therefore, there is a big gap of awareness between public and industry and the application of sustainable development needs participation of everyone in the community. It is not possible without the participation of not only popular and effective people are aware of how their daily activities and tasks but also meaning of sustainability and how apply it. As industrial organizations grow very rapidly day by day due to economic growth and employees’ well-being, the natural resources deplete causing environmental effects (e.g., emissions and pollution). Therefore, governments have stipulated a variety of laws and regulations to protect the environment, and industrial organizations must create
environmental management systems to monitor their daily production/manufacturing operations [1]. Since the last 20 years, the concept of sustainability/sustainable development was appeared and popularized around the world and some regulations request from industrial organizations to release their environmental data to employees and public. This concept achieved a very common acceptance. This acceptance shows that there is a degree of awareness with respect to sustainability [2]. The most important task undertaken by sustainability and /or sustainable development is the need to raise awareness of this concept and admit this acceptance than in public (e.g., people) and in the field (e.g., industry). Awareness in a workplace environment (e.g., industry) is different than public. Increasing employees’ awareness of sustainability within their workplace can encourage them to implement sustainability principles and practices into their own personal activities. Although there are three dimensions of sustainability (economic, social, and environmental), the two dimensions of sustainability (economic and social) are usually used a lot in workplaces without being known from employees. Academicians in educational institutions are also responsible to provide the concepts of sustainability and
2212-8271 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of Assembly Technology and Factory Management/Technische Universität Berlin. doi:10.1016/j.procir.2015.03.003
Ibrahim H. Garbie / Procedia CIRP 26 (2015) 64 – 69 sustainable development to their students through their classes and courses within one or more chapters. Although sustainable engineering was recommended to be studied as a new educational course in Engineering Schools [3], it is preferable to add one or more chapters in each course talking about or explaining the sustainability concept in his/her course (author perspective). The remaining part of this paper is organized into several sections as follows. Section 2 conducts a brief literature review related to awareness of sustainability. Section three describes the proposed approach for measuring the sustainability assessment. An industry-based case study will be discussed and implemented in Section four. Section five provides a conclusion.
2. Literature Review Although huge research works have been published in the area of sustainability, there are few studies regarding sustainability implementation and awareness. Affecting of awareness regarding green information technology was studied and presented with respect to environmental sustainability [1]. Sustainable engineering was recommended to be studied as a new educational course in Engineering Schools [3]. Accenture [4] investigated through hundreds of companies around the World to see the importance of sustainability. This study showed that almost 93% of these companies though their chief executive officer (CEO) considered sustainability as the most important issues to be successes and/or survived. Studies of sustainability programs from some companies show that good environmental practices will increase their profit [5]. Innovation for increasing competitiveness, lowering costs and increasing revenues in some companies was analyzed [6]. The value of sustainability was recognized through studies of business strategy of some companies related to innovation [7]. Motivators and barriers to adapt sustainability concept to overcome current issues faced by manufacturing industry were investigated [8]. Glavic and Lukman [9] presented sustainability terms, definitions and interconnections for understanding and better communication in the process toward sustainable development. Sustainability information in the print press journals, periodicals and textbooks to provide the development of sustainability science was analyzed [10]. A fully detailed discussion about sustainable manufacturing showing the importance of sustainable manufacturing as one of the most important issues regarding sustainable development was presented [11]. Challenges, perspectives and recent advances in support of sustainable production operations decisionmaking through sustainable design, sustainable manufacture and sustainable supply chain management were reviewed [12]. Requirements of manufacturing systems in a wide scope with clarifying their limitations and bottlenecks were discussed [13]. Importance of integrating sustainability with manufacturing and along different objectives (function, competitiveness, profitability and productivity) was investigated [14]. Key requirements for engineering sustainability including sustainable resources, sustainable
processes, increased efficiency and reduced environment impact were identified [15]. A brief explanation and an analysis of sixteen of the most widely initiatives to embed sustainability into companies’ systems were provided [16]. 3. Proposed approach Measuring the level of sustainability awareness regarding industrial organizations is based on the stakeholder types. These types are: academic, government, public, and industry. Each type has its own infrastructure and the total industrial organization awareness is aggregated based on these individual types. Estimating the degrees of sustainability awareness in industrial organizations are still ambiguous and an ill-structured problem because they are subjectively described assessments and are unsuitable and ineffective classical techniques [17]. The analysis could be performed in an interview survey by quantifying the importance from 1 to 10 based on three concepts of evaluation: optimistic; most likely and pessimistic. This analysis is also proposed from a system analyst’s perspective, which means it has some delimitation by distributing a questionnaire among experts in public (regular people), government, industry, and professors (academic). These questions might not be enough but they give an idea of how the industrial organization is struggling today and an indication of influences in the future. 3.1 Fuzzy logic approach The basic architecture of each awareness type (academic, government, public, and industry) is depicted in Figure 1. In order to perform the awareness type evaluation, the system architecture consists of three main parts: fuzzification interface, fuzzy measure, and defuzzification interface. Non-fuzzy data (crisp) Fuzzification interface Fuzzy measure Defuzzification interface Nonfyzzy output (crisp)
Figure 1: Architecture for fuzzy logic Approach The proposed technique will be adapted to combine all dimensions and their corresponding infrastructures to determine the overall performance for academic, government, public, and industry. All these issues will be explained in the following steps: Step 1: Questionnaires are designed for each issue including all essential elements regarding public, government; industry and academic (see section 3.2). Step 2: Questionnaires are distributed to specific experts. Step 3: Questionnaires containing raw values are gathered separately. Step 4: Raw data are aggregated.
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Ibrahim H. Garbie / Procedia CIRP 26 (2015) 64 – 69 Step 5: Data which are coming from questionnaire are divided into the infrastructures (general, economic, social, and environmental). The raw value of each basic variable should be transformed into an index that is bounded in the uniform range from 1 to 10 by using the best value and worst value for the basic attributes. The transformation process normalizes the attribute values in relation to the best and worst values for a particular criterion Step 6: The fuzzification interface for infrastructures is used to transform crisp data into fuzzy data using the following Equation (1). (1) P ( xi ) Z i WV BV WV Where: Zi= raw value of each attribute or each question (WV< Zi < BV), = linear transformation index value (membership), BV = best value = 10, WV = worst value = 1. The expert assigns the best value (BV) and the worst value (WV) for a particular attribute. The linear transformation index value can be calculated for the raw value of each attribute, as follows [17-18]: Step 7: The measure of the fuzziness (f) of each aspect (general concept, economic, social and environmental) is used as in the following Equation (2)
ª n Aˆ º p f ( Aˆ ) j 1 «¦ P Aˆ ( xi ) P Aˆ ( xi ) /( n )» A ( ) ¬« i 1 ¼»
1
p
(2)
Where: p = 2 at the euclidean metric, n(A)= number of attributes (questions) in each infrastructure, j = status of fuzzy member triangle (pessimistic, optimistic, and most likely). Step 8: The aggregate measure (agg.) of the fuzziness (f) for all infrastructures regarding each aspect is determined using the following Equation (3). 1 f (D ) j
ªninf rastr 2º « ¦ 2P inf ra ( xi ) 1 » i 1 ¬ ¼ 1 1 ninf ra P
P
(3)
Each status was given a relative score and the measuring of fuzziness of each awareness type (D) is estimated: The output from Step 8 is a fuzzy membership function for the awareness level for each type of stakeholder (academic, government, public, and industry), which can be defuzzified to yield a non-fuzzy output value (crisp data are needed) from an inferred fuzzy output. Step 9: Evaluate the defuzzification values using the following equation (4). (4) X ( p 2m o) / 4 Where: p = pessimistic, o = optimistic, m = most likely The output domain X is a unique solution and uses all the information of the output membership function distribution. Step 10: Assess the measured awareness level of each type of stakeholder. The output from Step 9 is the current value of awareness level. All of these steps are shown in Figure 2. 3.2. Designing a questionnaire In this paper, questionnaire templates were created based on four perspectives: one for general concept of sustainability and one for each dimension of the triple bottom line (TBL). These questionnaire templates are mainly used to guide the representatives at the industrial organizations to facilitate diagnosis of the current status of representatives in each area
(academic, public, government, and industry). The interviews with representatives at the industrial organizations included the following basic steps: one employee or employees involved in preparing the questionnaire template as a preinterview; conducting the interview with the representatives; summary and analyze the results after implementing the interview, and corrections of the results [19]. To conduct this proposed approach into action, the two questionnaire templates were designed and constructed, one for the public (people in academic, government, and public), and the second for employees in industry. By distributing those questionnaires among many different people with different backgrounds and academic qualifications, it will be able to see the difference in the levels of awareness. To conduct this approach and survey into action, one industry company is used to illustrate the proposed approach and concepts. Estimating awareness with respect to academic, government, and public will be constant in both case studies. Measuring academics awareness After calculating the academics’ awareness surveys, it can be noticed that the level of sustainability awareness about the economic, social and environmental aspects is medium. This may be due to the fact that academics usually have an intermediate background and knowledge. This can be noticed in Figure 3, where the general, economic, social and environmental sustainability awareness are 0.3165, 0.523, 0.5456 and 0.5535, respectively. The academic awareness is estimated as a 0.77 and this value seems slightly higher than medium. Measuring government awareness After distributing the survey in some of the ministries in Muscat, Oman, it was found that the overall awareness is not bad at all. The economic dimension leads with 0.77 followed by the social dimension with 0.74. The general concept follows with 0.54 and lastly comes the environmental dimension with 0.41. Figure 4 illustrates those results and the overall degree of awareness regarding government was 0.82 and this value is considered as a high. Measuring public awareness After conducting the survey with some people in public in different categories, the level of awareness in the different dimensions was 0.1753, 0.3776, 0.7648, and 0.5979 for general concept, economic, social, and environmental sustainability, respectively (see Figure 5). Based on these results, the degree of awareness regarding public awareness was 0.52. This value seems medium and it needs to be improved. Measuring industry awareness After distributing the survey through industrial company, it was found that the degrees of awareness with respect to general, economic, social and environmental dimensions are 0.61, 0.52, 0.59, and 0.57, respectively (see Figure 6). The level of industry awareness for industrial company is 0.83 and this value seems to be high comparing with academic, government, and public.
Ibrahim H. Garbie / Procedia CIRP 26 (2015) 64 – 69
Figure 2: Flow chart in each awareness (stakeholder) type for sustainability awareness
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Ibrahim H. Garbie / Procedia CIRP 26 (2015) 64 – 69 5. Conclusions
0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0
Figure 3: Academic sustainability awareness
1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0
Figure 4: Government sustainability awareness
1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0
Figure 5: Public sustainability awareness
0.65 0.6 0.55 0.5 0.45
Figure 6: Industry (Company) sustainability awareness.
This paper was used to estimate and measure the level of sustainability awareness in industrial organizations as a whole including all stakeholders. This concept of awareness has been clarified through these stakeholders, and the proposed awareness measurement technique was presented and analysed individually and aggregated based on a specific designed questionnaire survey for each stakeholder. As sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations, the three dimensions/pillars of sustainability: economy, society and environment and general sustainability concepts are studied and investigated to see the degree of importance and/or acceptance of them in these industrial organizations. Employees from real companies beside departments in government, professors in educational institutions and people in the public were interviewed and used to answer these questionnaires. The results of the questionnaire surveys that have been distributed to the academics, governments, public and industrial companies in Oman prove that the concept of sustainability is not fully understood and it still needs more attention from all stakeholders especially in public and academic. It can be noticed from the results that industrial companies focused more on environmental and social sustainability than economic sustainability. On the contrary, awareness of economic sustainability represents the highest importance in governmental departments than others.
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