Comments On Discussions-MBA Summer

Chapter 12 mainly concentrates on creating an entity’s sustainability operations. It discusses how an entity can take steps towards emphasizing zero-emissions.

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Successful businesses question assumptions, they think across disciplines, and they are creative about the way that their products are made (Weybrecht, pg. 223). Operations management has a large impact on how sustainable a company can make itself. Operations management determines how materials are sourced and manufactured throughout the supply chain and also how it is to be used which helps control the product life-cycle. There has been a recent shift from organizations not recognizing it is their responsibility to build sustainable operations management to realizing that it really should be an internal duty of the company. This is mainly due to the fact that consumers have vocalized that sustainable processes are valuable to them. This has helped operations management across consumer brands to focus on sustainability and deliver on consumer values and even possibly create competitive advantages.

There are many reasons for why operations management is important especially in the context of sustainability practices. Developing sustainableis important because: • Responsibility for valuing sustainable practices has shifted from the consumer to

the corporation • Creates the opportunity to reduce cost and improve operational efficiency • It complies with existing and prepares for future legislation

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• It decreases the risk of bad press • It improves quality and customer satisfaction

The aim of operations management’s approach to sustainability is to ultimately establish zero environmental impact through a product’s lifecycle. This can be a difficult proposition for any company because of complicated supply chain networks. In order for a company to reach zero impact, they will need to focus on (Weybrecht, 226): • Eco-design • Green chemistry • Doing more with less • Sustainable technologies • Suppliers and contractors • Transportation • Waste management • Life-cycle analysis

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The 8 focuses for sustainable operations will be further explained on this slide. In order to reach zero emissions an entity must balance and emphasize each of these items.

Eco design is the intentional design of a product to align with reducing the environmental/social impact throughout it’s entire life-cycle. To do this an entity needs to re-think function/material inputs, re-duce inputs, re-place harmful substances, re-cycle materials, re-use inputs, and diminish need for re-pair. By concentrating on these things then the design of the product can be made to be more environmentally sustainable.

Green chemistry mainly concerns designing safer materials/chemicals with less or no environmental toxicity. It further emphasizes using renewable materials like waste back into the manufacturing process, increasing energy efficiency, creating degrading materials, attempting to eliminate overall manufacturing waste, and minimizing potential risk of accidents. This goes along with eco-design because it concentrates on the inputs needed for product manufacturing as well as how their overall life-cycle will impact the environment.

The next focus is for entities to concentrate on doing more with their products by using less. This means decreasing the the consumption of resources, reducing the overall impact of production on nature, and also increasing consumer

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value. Then the entity should concentrate on developing sustainable

techonologies. There are four different types of sustainable technologies: • Remediation technologies – technology used to treat environmental problems

after they have already occurred • Abatement technologies – technology used for preventative measures. These

technologies help deter possible environmental issues before they arise. • Pollution prevention technologies – technology that concentrates on the

production of technology to limit pollution. Scrubbers are one example of pollution prevention technologies.

• Sustainable technologies – these are the ultimate goal of technology for sustainability and they are capable of achieving low to no environmental impact.

Next, there are suppliers and contractors. This main focus really is to integrate suppliers into the overall life-cycle of a company’s products, because using environmentally conscious suppliers is the responsibility of the entity. If the supplier network performs poorly then it also reflects on upon the overall entity. This priciniple states that entities should create policies to improve supplier performance and consult with them to help improve.

Then the entity should consider transportation analysis. Transportation of materials/services can create a large set of problems like emissions, traffic accidents, and reliance on non-renewable energies. Companies should place an emphasis on transitioning to renewable and shift R&D operations to find different ways to transport materials through increasingly sustainable methodology.

Next, there is waste management considerations. As I mentioned earlier the goal of waste management is to do a few things: preventing waste altogether, reduce portions of waste, recycle and integrate waste into manufacturing, and improve disposal methods.

Finally, the last thing that an entity should take into consideration when determining the optimimum approach to sustainable operations management. The operations department should take each of the factors discussed previously into account when analyzing the overall impact of how their decisions will impact the environment over the entire product’s life-cycle.

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It is easy to say how companies should improve upon their sustainability efforts within their operations teams. However, there are many barriers to prevent company’s from being able to integrate the sustainable recommendations in previous slides.

Company’s struggle to gather the real data needed to make informed decisions on how to make their processes more sustainable. When the data is there, then another issue is how reliable it really is. This issue is amplified even further when considering gathering data from supplier networks. Then there are issues that could arise in how much the supplier vs. the company values sustainability. It is hard for a company to change the operations of it’s supplier network unless it carries great value to the supplier. It could be the result of communication breakdowns or different shareholder values. Another reason for a barrier to sustainable operations is the high number of standards that already exist and will further be created. The regulations often cause hgihg levels of confusion internally for company’s and can create redundancies with several different efforts at similar objectives. The final issues that could cause barriers to entry are that making change takes time especially across an entire enterprise and finding the best ways to operate sustainability can be challenging. So it will take time and some creativity to properly structure an entity’s sustainability operations.

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