Integration of Sustainable Supply Chain Management in PLM system

Abstract

Most of industries have operated in an unsustainable way for many years. Materials, energy, and other resources have been used inefficiently throughout the supply chains, with unsustainable levels of waste generation. In many cases, disposal stage or logistic activities were not considered on the design stage. But in recent years, due to an improving concern to environment and sustainability topics, new initiatives for sustainable development in companies have appeared. One of these new initiatives is the sustainable Supply Chain (sSC) and green Supply Chain, which have been receiving growing attention. However, as Pagell and Wu (2009) said, there are still fundamental issues that researchers need to address in order to offer managers prescriptive models of how to create sustainable supply chains. It is for this reason that this thesis gives a model to provide managers with tools for the sustainable Supply Chain Management (sSCM) implementation. The essential tool used in this case for the implementation is Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. Nowadays, the vast majority of industrial companies in manufacture sector have implemented PLM projects (Kadiri et al., 2009). The PLM philosophy has provided them with useful software to manage information using the product as a central element. The aim of integrating management of product is to overcome the existing organizational barriers and to streamline the value creation chain (Schuh et al., 2008). These characteristics turn PLM into an appealing tool for the integration of sSCM and, with this combination, achieve the sustainability performance. The proposed method is a guide for companies which want to introduce sustainable development in their policies. The methodology gives five steps to provide companies with a way to structure their thoughts of environmental issues applied to SC. The method is based on monitoring indicators in all product lifecycle stages and the application of environmental actions using PLM data.