Sustainable manufacturing excellence (SuMEx)

Sustainable manufacturing requires manufacturers to evaluate the environmental impacts of the products, including designs, materials, and production methods.  Existing tools are limited for rapid modelling of product families and supply chain configurations. This project develops a software solution using impact libraries and LCA methods to enable fast and configurable analyses of environmental impacts, with pilot testing for production design and planning scenarios.

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With increasingly stringent environmental regulations and growing pressure from business partners, companies are now required to disclose their environmental impacts more transparently. Properly evaluating these impacts using Life cycle assessment (LCA) is essential, but many companies lack the expertise to conduct LCA effectively. Hiring analysts or consultants is often costly or unfeasible, leaving businesses in need of accessible solutions. A user-friendly tool that simplifies LCA calculations and adapts to different production scenarios—whether low or high volume, and low or high variety— is beneficial for the companies to meet compliance demands, optimize their environmental performance, and stay competitive. 

SuMEx develops configurable software tool specifically for companies’ partners. It is specifically designed as an LCA tool to cater their needs and can be used with an ease to rapidly calculate environmental impacts of their products. It integrates EPD template where the results are automatically exported for the report and users will be guided by prompted questions to fill all the requirements in the EPD. Companies then verify the result with authorized third party verificator to get the document certified or had they chosen not to, can use it as self-declared environmental claims documents. 

The academic results derived from the project are published in academic journals, ensuring widespread dissemination and accessibility to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. The research team consists of University of Vaasa, Finland and Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.