Document [original]

Procedia CIRP 26 ( 2015 ) 641 – 645

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doi: 10.1016/j.procir.2014.07.097

ScienceDirect

12th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing

Model-based Evaluation Environment for Sustainability

Nicole Oertwiga*, Nikolaus Wintrichb, Roland Jochema

a Department for Quality Science, Technical University Berlin, PTZ, Pascalstr. 8-9, 10587 Berlin, Germany

b Division of Corporate Management, Fraunhofer IPK, Pascalstr. 8-9, 10587 Berlin, Germany

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +49-30-39006-176; fax: +49-30-393-2503. E-mail address: [email protected]

Abstract

Nowadays, many companies are using enterprise models within an enterprise planning system to develop their business strategy. In order to

follow a holistic sustainability approach, environmental, economic and social aspects have to be integrated into these models on a strategic,

tactical and operational level. This results in an increased model complexity and requires mechanisms to ensure consistency and efficient model

management. Furthermore, the user is confronted with a variety of data and is not able to perform model validation and verification as well as

using the enterprise model as a tool for operational support. This paper presents an approach of a model-based evaluation environment by

extending enterprise models with sustainability artefacts, to empower the users within their decision-making towards a sustainable enterprise

orientation. A framework for contextual enterprise modelling is applied to provide configurable individual model evaluation and application

views.

Peer-review under responsibility of Assembly Technology and Factory Management/Technische Universität Berlin.

Keywords: Enterprise model; sustainability; evaluation views; complexity; context

1. Introduction

Enterprise planning and development are very complex

and comprehensive tasks. Especially in the context of

sustainability, additional legislative and stakeholder

requirement considerations make it much more challenging to

manage these tasks effectively than it used to be some years

ago. Based on the triple bottom line approach to sustainability

[1] economic, environmental and social aspects need to be

considered. The firm’s overall objectives thus become

multidimensional and have to be broken down to the single

departments and business fields. To ensure a systematic

embedding of the individual business strategies, objectives

and their monitoring within all levels, enterprise models are

particularly suitable as an instrument within enterprise

planning to combine these three elements into one holistic

approach. Tools for defining and visualizing performance

indicators are no longer sufficient to capture the complex

requirements of a comprehensive sustainability approach to

enterprise planning. Moreover, a solution for enterprise

sustainability management (ESuM) and its evaluation is

required to balance economic, environmental and social

dimensions, thus ensuring an improved level of decision

making. Today, there exist a number of methods and systems

which provide an insight into the effects of substance,

material and energy flows and balances on the environment.

Enterprises use these to fulfil mandatory reporting

requirements necessitated by the legal and market

environment as well as own corporate objectives. These

requirements push firms towards ensuring quality

improvement, managing production cycle reductions and to

consider thresholds for energy consumption and carbon

footprints [2].

However, all these methods focus on the production

processes and are limited to the evaluation of quantitative

aspects of sustainability [3]. Drawing conclusions from these

aspects for the overall corporate is neither representative of

the actual state of progress nor would this lead to the

identification of potential levers for improvement. In order to

make decisions for the whole enterprise and to act on its

individual sustainability targets, a lot more information about

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Peer-review under responsibility of Assembly Technology and Factory Management/Technische Universität Berlin.

642 Nicole Oertwig et al. / Procedia CIRP 26 ( 2015 ) 641 – 645

interdependencies between processes is needed to ensure that

also qualitative aspects are taken into account.

This paper presents a model-based approach, which allows

connecting enterprise planning and operational controlling.

Based on an integrated enterprise model the demands of

managerial planning and operational controlling are depicted

in a model-based evaluation environment. The presented

approach is a further development of the multi-perspective

modeling within the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1026

– “Shaping Global Manufacturing Sustainable Value

Creation” [4], [5]. It illustrates how planning objectives,

indicators and visualization components can interact based on

an integrated enterprise model and how the different

dimensions and stakeholders are supported by individual

evaluations.

2. Sustainability aspects for enterprise planning

Today, enterprises are forced to align their own objectives

with the needs of all their stakeholders in order to generate

profits. Particularly in a time characterized by globalization,

shorter product life cycles, decreasing prices, new

technologies and increasing sustainability demands,

enterprises need an efficient and customer-oriented way of

their planning activities. In this context, many companies use

enterprise processes as a common backbone for the different

management disciplines with the objective of developing

holistic strategies that can be implemented fast and

consistently at all levels of the enterprise [6]. Subsequently,

enterprise processes can be measured, evaluated, controlled

and aligned to the needs of customers. Enterprise planning is

concerned with the future state of structures, processes and

events and is thus an essential task of the management and

controlling. It can only work efficiently if all data, actions and

facts which are relevant for the decision-making and thus for

the control are taken into account. Every business activity

requires planning and allows identifying potential impacts and

consequences of individual decisions.

Enterprise planning is a management approach that

supports the corporate management in their economic,

environmental and social decision making. The challenges

posed by adopting a sustainability approach to enterprise

planning have not only increased the scope of planning

environments, but also the complexity of internal tasks

emphasizing the need for a closer coordination between the

firm’s strategic, tactical and operational planning. Moreover,

an enterprise which aims to adopt an integrated sustainability

approach has to integrate long-term, medium-term and short-

term targets into its planning process to meet the needs of its

stakeholders [7].

The definitions of the different planning levels and their

relations in terms of sustainability are shortly summarized in

this section.

2.1. Strategic planning

Strategic planning covers a period of 5-10 years and aims

at assuring the long-term competitiveness of the enterprise.

The main goal is to define a set of strategies which will allow

the organization to achieve its mission statement and establish

its desired position in the market. The strategic objectives

defined at this stage can only be relevant and effective if the

entire corporate knowledge is drawn upon and only if these

accurately reflect the company’s overall mission. At this level

of planning the vision of a sustainable development can be

broken down into e.g. energy policy, environmental policy

and social policy. A common goal in the industry is, for

example, the reduction of production-related energy and

resource consumption. The collection of information about

the sustainability performance, for instance under the aspect

of resource efficiency, should always be seen from a

corporate perspective. The aim of such a sustainability

performance evaluation is to establish how an enterprise can

improve its operations on a local, regional and global level.

An overall strategy that incorporates the demands of a holistic

sustainability approach must be supported by high level

management. Moreover, the implementation of formulated

policies and strategies is only possible if tangible objectives

are derived and suitable indicators are available for each

department and business area [8].

2.2. Tactical planning

Within the tactical enterprise planning, medium-term

strategies are defined with a period of up to 5 years. The task

of the tactical planning is to “translate” the firm’s overall

strategy into a multi-period program, capacity and financial

planning, the elaboration of concrete operational objectives at

the level of the enterprise as a whole and its sub-areas as well

as the definition of resources and measures to achieve. An

instance of a tactical objective, derived from the vision of a

lower consumption of energy and resources, could be to

reduce energy demand by 20% within the next 5 years based

on the financial year 2012/2013. At this level, planning

objectives are already quantitatively oriented and should be

coordinated horizontally as well as vertically [9]. Enterprise

models are well suited to support the planner to cope with the

increasing complexity caused by the additional demands of an

extensive sustainability approach. The enterprise model

considers the business processes holistically and can be used

as an instrument to ensure that the derived objectives are

coordinated horizontally and vertically on the level of the

overall enterprise as well as on the level of enterprise units.

Furthermore, the tactical planning sets out a course of action

of how the enterprise aims to achieve its strategic objectives.

To lower its energy consumption, for instance, the company

has to take measures which allow the operational level to

control and monitor its actual situation e.g. by utilizing an

energy cockpit, which would identify potential areas for

improvement. Enterprise models and its processes are

particularly helpful in understanding interdependencies and

cause-and-effect relations for environmental and social

demands.

2.3. Operational planning

The operational planning mostly covers a period of one

year. The main task is the planning and control of the defined

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Nicole Oertwig et al. / Procedia CIRP 26 ( 2015 ) 641 – 645

objectives during the tactical planning phase. The operational

planning sets out responsibilities, schedules and addresses

processes and procedures that influence the desired outcome.

For example, energy savings could be realized by shutting

down machines and equipment if they are not used in

operational processes (e.g. breaks, change of shift). The

operational level has to identify where and when such shut

downs are possible and who would be responsible for the

realization. In addition to the tactical planning, the operational

planning is also bounded by the conditions set out in the

strategic planning process. The control of the degree of target

attainment in particular is central to the operational planning

process. Therefore, the measurements for different indicators

have to be defined and realized in the operational business.

The monitoring of sustainability aspects (like energy

consumption, pollution and waste) is already very process-

oriented, but only production processes are typically

monitored and evaluated for optimizing the resource and

material efficiency [10].

Creating a holistic sustainability reporting framework is

not a new issue. Many companies worldwide have been

participating in voluntary international initiatives to establish

a common set of standards for sustainability reporting. For

this approach, various types of reports with sustainability

indicators have been taken into account. This does not only

include sustainability reports, but also e.g. environmental

reports (e.g. ISO 14031 for Environmental Management [11])

or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports (e.g. Social

Accountability 8000 [12]). The indicators considered were

divided into the three categories economic, environmental and

social according to the triple bottom line. The selection

method of indicators for this approach was similar to the

approach of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) [13].

Accordingly, the indicators within a sustainability report

should deal with important issues, which are either relevant in

the economic, environmental or social sphere or which have

an influence on the decisions of stakeholders. Furthermore, a

mapping with the three described planning dimensions has

been done. Exemplary important performance indicators for

each group are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Selected sustainability indicators

Category Indicator name Planning dimension

economic costs for environmental

management within organization

return on Investment

reject rate

Productivity

percentage of certified suppliers

strategic

tactical

operational

strategic

environmental raw material use

energy use

water use

emissions

waste

tactical/operational

strategic/tactical/

operational

social working days lost through

sickness absence

tactical/operational

social employee turnover

qualification index

employee participation in

improvement process

percentage of females in

executive positions

strategic/tactical

tactical/operational

strategic/tactical

The following section presents an integrated approach of

how enterprise planning can be supported by a model-based

evaluation environment for sustainability based on objectives

and indicators.

3. Model-based evaluation environment

3.1. Approach

The development of a comprehensive enterprise strategy

which meets all given requirements from internal, external

stakeholders and especially sustainability perspectives

requires a sound information basis on which several

evaluations can be performed. Since an enterprise consists of

several different units and elements which are related to each

other on several levels (active vs. passive or strong vs. weak

relationship) it is necessary to consider all influences and

possible side effects within the planning process.

A representation of an enterprise referring to aspects of

structure, activities, process, information, resources, people,

behavior, goals and constraints of a business, government, or

other enterprise, is defined as enterprise model [14]. To

create such an enterprise model, the integrated enterprise

modeling (IEM) [15] is used, because it is fully object

oriented and therefore facilitates the integration of

sustainability aspects. In addition, the IEM is also conform to

the international standard EN/ISO 19440 (constructs for

enterprise modeling) [16] and is fully supported by the

enterprise modelling tools MO²GO and Process Assistant

(PA) [17], [18], [19].

The strategic vision of an enterprise is closely linked to the

operational point of view. Here, MO²GO offers appropriate

advanced views regarding mapping of decision chains from

the strategic level to the execution of the operational levels,

which reflect the interaction between them. This is achieved

by integrating the GRAI GRID [20] technology. In order to

elucidate also the relationship between indicators and

objectives, the ECOGRAI [21] method is integrated as well.

The elements of the views are connected with MO²GO

classes, objects (product, order, resource and action) and

attributes and can be evaluated over the entire business model

(e.g. which processes are influenced by the objective and

which degree of performance do these objectives have)

Within this approach specific (see Table 1) sustainability

key performance indicators are integrated into an IEM-model

by mapping them to their related objectives as well as

enterprise objects (e.g. process steps, machines, products,

buildings). Since many of these indicators are measured by

specific sensors and systems (e.g. energy consumption) and

most of them support an API, the data is not directly imported

into the model but the source systems are linked via the API

644 Nicole Oertwig et al. / Procedia CIRP 26 ( 2015 ) 641 – 645

address. This also facilitates the use of real-time data within

the individual evaluation views, which allows a fast

verification and validation of the business strategy

implementation. A general overview of the described

approach is presented in Fig. 1.

Based on this enriched integrated enterprise model, where

all elements are related to each other, several evaluations can

be performed to empower the users within their decision-

making towards a sustainable enterprise orientation.

Integrating further aspects, information and data into the

enterprise model results in anincreased model complexity and

requires mechanisms to ensure consistency and efficient

model management. Furthermore, the user is confronted with

a variety of data and is not able to perform model validation

and verification as well as using the enterprise model as a tool

for operational support. To reduce the model complexity and

allow an efficient model management, a framework for

contextual enterprise modelling is applied to provide

configurable individual model application and evaluation

views [22].

The framework for contextual enterprise modelling

provides specific application and evaluation views by

reducing the range of objects to those which are needed by the

user and/or for his task. For instance, elements are not only

hidden from view, but also re-arranged or presented in

completely different ways, reducing the overall complexity

and allowing an efficient modelling.

3.2. Application

The application of the presented approach can be divided

into two different steps. In the first step, all relevant input data

(like sustainability indicators, real-time data sources,

enterprise objectives) are collected and mapped into the

enterprise model. Therefore, this step can be described as

building step.

The second step can be described as model evaluation or

consuming step. Role specific model evaluation views can be

configured and presented within the Process Assistant, a web-

based process management tool. Therefore, a management

cockpit was implemented in the PA, which summarizes all

selected KPI’s and enterprise information in a central system

(Fig. 2.).

The management cockpit supports the enterprise planning

by delivering up-to-date (real-time) data which are necessary

for reliable planning and controlling. It also represents a

central enterprise information center.

4. Conclusion and Outlook

A key factor for successful enterprise management is the

availability of evaluation tools for performance monitoring

and tracking from a qualitative and quantitative point of view.

In this paper, a model-based evaluation environment for

Fig. 1. Model-based evaluation environment (based on IEM)

Fig. 2. Real-time management cockpit within the Process Assistant

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Nicole Oertwig et al. / Procedia CIRP 26 ( 2015 ) 641 – 645

sustainability has been presented to provide such qualitative

and quantitative views. Therefore, sustainability KPI’s were

integrated into enterprise models to enable a holistic

sustainable enterprise planning and empower the users within

their decision-making process. Furthermore, the mapping of

sustainability indicators with their related enterprise objects

allows identifying dependencies between enterprise decisions

(e.g. changes within the product portfolio or lot sizes) and

their effects on the sustainability KPI’s. However, further

steps in the field of sustainability evaluation are needed to

extend the scope towards the complete supply chain in order

to evaluate the whole value-creation network performance. In

addition to supporting the enterprise planning, the application

within the operational enterprise management on a daily basis

needs to be examined.

Acknowledgements

We extend our sincere thanks to all who contributed to

preparing this paper. Especially, we thank the German

Research Foundation DFG for the funding of the

Collaborative Research Centre 1026 "Sustainable

Manufacturing – shaping global value creation" (SFB 1026/1

2012).

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