Ecofactory

Background:

In past approaches, when trying to optimize the environmental performance of a com-pany’s Supply Chain, the focus was often placed on the intercompany logistics pro-cesses, e.g. the choice of the means of transport. Manufacturing companies, espe-cially SMEs, are increasingly beginning to no-tice that the degrees of freedom to optimize their logistics processes are very limited as opposed to their own production processes. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that not only transport, but especially manufactur-ing companies’ own production facilities ac-count for a large amount of their environmen-tal impact.  

Motivation:

Therefore, the environmental perspective on production processes is gaining in importance for manufacturing companies. While in the past, companies focused only on the economic performance when planning their production processes, e.g. costs, delivery, quality or flexibil-ity, they are now increasingly taking into ac-count environmental implications such as emissions, energy consumption, water and material use. Nevertheless, companies need guidance and tools in order to holistically as-sess what improvement measures will result in the optimal environmental and economic performance of their production processes, i.e. the optimal eco-efficiency.

Objectives:

The aim of the project EcoFactory is to develop a holistic procedure model that enables manu-fac­turing companies to improve the eco-efficiency of their production processes. The procedure will integrate a software tool, which is based on a novel approach combining Dis­crete Event Simulation and Material Flow Analy­sis. The software will enable manufactur­ing companies to perform detailed analyses of different improvement measures in order to achieve the optimal eco-efficiency of their pro­duction processes.

Activities in 2013:

The activities in the final stage of the research focused primarily on refining previously developed elements and implementing them within the case companies. As such, elements of the developed procedure were redesigned, which significantly improved its applicability and integration in an industrial environment. The software tool, wich had primarily been developed in 2012, was further refined by developing additional important functionality and eliminating bugs as well as improving its practicability. The finalized project results were then successfully applied at the four case companies. The application and the results achieved within the case studies led to interesting results and important impulses to improve the eco-efficiency of the production systems under analysis. The project was finalized at the end of June 2013 to the full satisfaction of all project members.

In order to further develop and commercially exploit the project results, EMPA (now spun off into the Swiss representation of Quantis), HTW and Effizienzagentur Schweiz are currently embarking on a joint venture, in wich BWI will play an advisory role.