In the context of the DIT ecosystem’s environmental sustainability analysis, SUPSI is working on the development of a scalable methodology and a software tool to drive decision-making process.

Environmental Key Performance Indicators (E-KPIs)

First of all, Environmental Key Performance Indicators (E-KPIs), meant to assess environmental sustainability both at factory and ecosystem level, have been identified through the analysis of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) program operators (compliant to ISO 14025 standard) active in the field of furniture, peer-reviewed literature on industrial cases and EU Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) initiative (even though no pilots are active in the furniture scope).

A limited set of E-KPIs has been selected, fully covering the different environmental compartments (e.g. soil, air, water, human and ecosystem toxicity). The environmental assessment based on E-KPIs is exploited during the DIT platform use to optimize the production path of the concurrently designed furniture and is performed thanks to the Sustainability-Driven Orchestrator (SDO), which is under development.

Sustainability-Driven Orchestrator (SDO)

The tool is meant to provide an optimization performed through an environmental-related multi-objective function that will work on the E-KPIs identified as optimization parameters. The SDO is a web-based application designed to perform environmental assessment in compliance with LCA methodology stated in ISO 14040 framework, focusing both on the single company and its supply chain.

It allows editing models of processes, providing LCA results (via tables and graphics) for process improvement and generating an environmental label.

Being the LCA highly time and resource consuming, the SDO exploits the use of well-founded background data, but giving users the possibility to personalise their operation information in order to obtain the calculation of environmental indicators that are actually able to represent the impacts related to their specific process. Indeed, SDO’s Process Templates allow a reliable and simplified description of the manufacturing operations from a sustainability perspective, enabling to set up default parameters and impact values for each process, identify the critical (LCA-oriented) process parameters and instantiate the process on the company operations characteristics.

The following image is intended to show the main components belonging to the SDO, highlighting the integration point with the ERP module by means of REST services. Such component is in charge to rank suppliers, able to produce the foreseen product, at sustainability point of view.