"Real-Time Integrated Economic and Environmental Performance Monitoring of a Production Facility"

In this paper, we describe our work and experiences with integrating environmental and economic performance monitoring in a production facility of Interface Flooring Systems, Inc. The objective of the work is to create a ‘dashboard’ that integrates environmental and economic monitoring and assessment of manufacturing processes, and provides engineers and managers an easy to use tool for obtaining valid, comparable assessment results that can be used to direct attention towards necessary changes. To this purpose, we build upon existing and familiar cost management principles, in particular Activity-Based Costing and Management (ABC&ABM), and we extend those into environmental management in order to obtain a combined economic and environmental performance measurement framework (called Activity-Based Cost and Environmental Management).  Furthermore, we enhance the response time of performance measurements by integrating data gathering capabilities from manufacturing process sensors. In this paper, we describe our motivation for this approach, as well as the lessons learned in the implementation.