Ilaria Giovanna Barletta

Energy Related Key Performance Indicators – State of the Art, Gaps and Industrial Needs

Better monitoring and control of energy consumption and effective use of performance indicators are of utmost important for achieving improved energy efficiency performance in manufacturing for current and future enterprises. This paper aims at analyzing the current state of the art on energy related production performance indicators to derive research gaps and industrial needs in the area. The research has been conducted as preliminary step before a comprehensive effort in which the authors suggest a new methodology to develop energy related key performance indicators. Therefore, the study resulted in a clearer understanding and synthesis of the research field, gaps in scientific literature and industrial needs, hence guiding further research.

Assessing a proposal for an energy-based overall equipment effectiveness indicator through discrete event simulation

New challenges demand that manufacturing companies adopt sustainable approaches and succeed in this adoption. Energy efficiency plays a key role in achieving sustainability goals, and performance indicators are necessary beyond measurement of data to evaluate energy efficiency. In this landscape, scalable and easy-to-understand metrics providing an energy competitiveness degree of manufacturing resources are currently missing. The study aims to test through simulation applicability and potential offered by a novel Energy Overall Equipment Effectiveness - Energy OEE - indicator for discrete manufacturing firms. A simulation of a discrete manufacturing CNC machine case is used to evaluate the applicability of using Energy OEE assessment for management decision support. As a result, this study paves the way to a better exploitation of data that energy monitoring and sensor technology aim to offer in the future.

Social Implications of Introducing Innovative Technology into a Product-Service System: The Case of a Waste-Grading Machine in Electronic Waste Management

This paper examines the social implications of introducing a new technology into the product-service system (PSS) of electronic waste management (EWM). Using a previously established set of social sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) targeting the operations level (i.e. impacts on EWM operators), social implications are examined in a case where a specific innovative new technology is introduced to replace manual sorting of e-waste into re-use, refurbish and recycle fractions. The social sustainability KPIs were applied to the case as a structured interview guide. The results showed that the KPI framework provided a good basis for examining the social impacts and also stimulated discussions about potential business impacts based on the human resources in the system. The framework showed that the implementation supported proactive social sustainability, but some additional conditions need to be addressed by the customer organization to make sure that potential risks (identified in the interview) are mitigated.

Prerequisites and Conditions for Socially Sustainable Manufacturing in Europe’s Future Factories – results overview from the SO SMART Project

This paper provides an overview of the EU project SO SMART (Socially Sustainable Manufacturing for the Factories of the Future), a coordinated support action (CSA) project. SO SMART examined the conditions in Europe for creating socially sustainable workplaces in the manufacturing sector, where factories flourish along with their social environment. The project was international (with partners from five countries), multidisciplinary and participatory, involving participation of several science domain experts and a wider community of academic and industry beneficiaries who participated in panels, workshops, conference events and an online forum created specifically for the project.