Posts tagged ‘Manufacturing’
How a New Design Revolution will Change Supply Chain Management
Howard Brown
Stories about Henry Ford’s genius with manufacturing abound, though it’s rarely clear which ones are actually true. One of my favorites is his insisting that parts manufacturers deliver their products to his plants in wooden crates of his design, which he then dismantled and used as floorboards in his cars.
Supply chain management has grown in sophistication and importance since Ford’s time. The quality movement, just-in-time manufacturing, corporate responsibility initiatives, enterprise-wide information systems, environmental impact analyses like life-cycle assessments, and growth in transparency and public access to information have all brought about major changes in supply change management. Now a new design revolution is about to create an even bigger change in supply chain thinking. The change will come both from new materials and products and from new manufacturing technologies.
Radical new materials and products (such as the ones we feature in the dMASS Insights newsletter) will themselves disrupt traditional supply chain relationships. For example, there are composite materials that exhibit behaviors with the potential to replace mechanical appliances, tools, and other machinery – even entire factories. There are materials that can be used to generate electricity by movement, temperature differences and solar energy conversion. Others have the ability to interfere with the growth of harmful bacteria, actively transfer heat or emit light with minimal energy subsidy. The cumulative effect of new materials and products will be shorter and simpler supply chains.
New manufacturing technologies will be at least as disruptive as the products themselves. Nano-scale manufacturing technologies such as Additive Layer Manufacturing (including 3D printing) and bio-manufacturing (the growing of products) stem from recent advances in the scientific understanding of how nature organizes itself at the most fundamental levels of matter and energy. Similarly, biomanufacturing stems from new discoveries in the fields of genetics and micro-organisms. The common thread among each of these technologies is a growing knowledge of nature’s tendency to self-organize, and an ability to leverage this knowledge.
Three-dimensional (3D)printing, in particular, has the potential to drastically cut resource demands, costs and dependence on resource-intensive supply chains, as well as pollution and waste. Advanced computer-aided design (CAD) systems bring design down to the level of individual molecules. The entire downstream supply chain for a 3D-printed product can be a set of printer cartridges containing different chemical elements. When laid down in precise proportions, the atoms arrange themselves into material structures with the desired characteristics. Printing can often be done in small shops, portable facilities, or even in the home. There is little or no need for high-temperature smelting in parts manufacturing, high-speed grinding or stamping that produces manufacturing scrap, or glues, adhesives, staples, rivets and other parts to hold separate pieces together.
Henry Ford’s tactic saved resources a century ago by creatively taking advantage of existing supply chain resources and harvesting value from waste. Nano- and bio-technologies will radically transform supply chain management in a new way. Business success will increasingly require understanding these technologies and taking advantage of the changes they will bring about.
What are your thoughts? Have you begun to experience supply chain changes due to commodity prices or supply problems, or due to the availability of new materials, products, or technologies?
Howard Brown is a noted entrepreneur and the founder of dMASS.net, an organization focused on helping businesses improve resource performance. For more than 20 years, he was CEO of the consultancy RPM Systems, Inc. (Resource Planning and Management), where he worked with companies such as International Paper, Mobil, BP, Duracell, Avery- Dennison, Whirlpool, SaraLee, and Wrigley, earning a worldwide reputation for developing practical strategies that merge environmental and business goals. To learn more about dMass, visit: http://www.dmass.net/wordpress/
Certifiably Sustainable?
Celia Spence
Measuring sustainability is something companies have been struggling with for several years, especially in the area of supply chain management. On August 2, UL Environment and Greener World Media announced a draft standard for manufacturing companies to measure and certify their sustainability.
The standard has been released for a 45-day comment period and the public is encouraged to review and provide comments in an open, transparent process. “ULE 880 – Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations” spans 102 indicators in five areas of sustainability, that include:
- Sustainability governance: How an organization leads and manages itself in relation to its stakeholders, including employees, investors, regulatory authorities, customers and the communities in which it operates.
- Environment: How an organization manages its environmental footprint across its policies, operations, products and services, including its resource use and emissions.
- Workforce: Issues related to employee working conditions, organization culture, benefits and retention.
- Customers and suppliers: Issues related to an organization’s policies and practices on product safety, quality, pricing and marketing as well as its supply chain policies and practices.
- Social and community engagement: An organization’s impacts on the communities in which it operates in the areas of social equity, ethical conduct and human rights.
Having a tool that will actually result in a score and allow companies to obtain certification could be extremely useful for those companies wishing to demonstrate that their supply chains or operations are sustainable. But the challenges we have faced with measuring sustainability have resulted from the enormous diversity of manufacturing processes, raw materials and cultural practices we encounter in global corporations.
It will be interesting to see how this has been addressed in this new standard. Is it actually possible to agree on the metrics that should be used to determine which of the companies among us is operating in a sustainable fashion? Are there too many subjective choices in deciding what is sustainable and what is not, or do we have enough of a consensus to move forward with a standard at this point?
It will be important to get involved in this and to provide our feedback on the draft. If such a standard is finalized and becomes widely used, it is something that will affect us all and shape the work that EHS managers do on a daily basis. What are your thoughts? Is a standard a welcome development? Will consensus be possible?
