E-BUSINESS WITH SOFTWARE SERVICES FOR SUSTAINABLE

MANUFACTURING

Sita Ramakrishnan

Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University

Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia

Subramania Ramakrishnan

CSIRO Manufacturing and Infrastructure Technology

37 Graham Road, Highett, Victoria 3190, Australia

Keywords:

Sustainability, environmental management in manufacturing, life cycle impacts, service oriented architecture.

Abstract:

With steady changes to the global environmental agenda over the past two decades, manufacturing companies

are driven to internalise environmental aspects of their businesses, both to meet local environmental regula-

tions and to conform to emerging international standards and best practices. Information on environmental

issues is crucial to assist companies in improving their environmental performance. We propose in this paper

the emerging service-oriented approach for establishing e-business by enabling the linking of relevant envi-

ronmental information to business processes, and to foster the sharing of information between sustainable

manufacturing companies. The links between the business functions of a manufacturing company and the

environmental dimension of the business are analysed in the paper. Using these links, a simpliﬁed service-

oriented software model is derived to deliver information on the life cycle environmental impacts of manu-

factured products. The proposed approach could provide a basis for developing innovative e-business with

software services, which could assist manufacturing companies, both large and small, to realise improvements

in environmental performance.

1 INTRODUCTION

Manufacturing deals with the transformation of ma-

terials into physical products upon which we heavily

rely in our daily lives, both at home and in working

environment. Manufacturing industry in any coun-

try is made up of companies of varying size, from

very small ones employing a handful of people to very

large ones having operations on a global scale. Man-

ufacturing is thus an important industrial global ac-

tivity pursued on a trans-national scale in many na-

tions of the world for economic and social wellbeing.

Owing to the impact that manufacturing industry has

on modern society, the industry needs to be viewed,

both at national and global levels, in the light of sus-

tainability goals, and weighed along the well-known

triple bottom line (Elkington, 1997) that includes eco-

nomic, social and environmental dimensions. The

environmental dimension is intrinsic to manufactur-

ing because making physical products requires ma-

terial transformation processes that use many materi-

als, consume energy, and produce wastes and emis-

sions. Furthermore, product users discard manufac-

tured products at the end of product life, thus lead-

ing to enormous wastes. Such wastes and emissions

generated by manufacturing companies ought to be

reduced in our journey towards attaining sustainabil-

ity. Industrial ecology, an emerging discipline based

on sustainability principles, recognizes the essential

interconnectedness of industry, economy and the en-

vironment (Graedel and Allenby, 1995), and attempts

to promote new approaches for internalisation by in-

dustry of the principles of triple-bottom line on an in-

tegrated basis.

The problem of integrating all the dimensions of

the triple bottom line at a business level is indeed

challenging. Currently there is considerable effort

around the world in ﬁnding ways for internalising en-

vironmental issues by businesses so that their envi-

ronmental performance can be improved. Both rele-

vant information and the delivery of such information

are important for improving the environmental per-

formance of manufacturing companies, as stressed by

many protagonists for sustainable materials produc-

tion and manufacturing (Graedel and Allenby, 1995).

A way of internalising environmental issues by

business into business practices is by conformance to

Environmental Management Accounting (EMA), rec-

ommended by United Nations Division of Sustainable

Development (Burritt, 2004).

Ramakrishnan S. and Ramakrishnan S. (2006).

E-BUSINESS WITH SOFTWARE SERVICES FOR SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 77-82

DOI: 10.5220/0001425900770082

 SciTePress

In this paper, we have considered the broader prob-

lem of delivering environmental information in differ-

ent forms and detail via service-oriented software to

meet many functional needs of manufacturing compa-

nies to assess and improve their environmental perfor-

mance in conformance with international standards.

The paper, in a conceptual sense, embodies many

principles of industrial ecology. The proposed soft-

ware for delivering environmental information fo-

cuses on designing clean processes, green products

and eco-efﬁcient systems. The information to be de-

livered by the software considers the entire life cy-

cle of manufactured products, from materials pro-

duction, manufacturing, use and closing the materi-

als loop (Figure 1) by shifting from traditional end-

of-pipe strategies to a life cycle approach (Schal-

tegger et al., 2003). Furthermore, the proposed ap-

proach for designing service-oriented software en-

ables the processes of internalising environmental is-

sues by linking the inﬂuence of the inevitable materi-

als ﬂow cycle associated with manufacturing to many

business functions that need to be carried out to im-

prove the environmental performance of entire prod-

uct value chains (Ramakrishnan et al., 2003; Ramakr-

ishnan, 2003).

In a pragmatic sense, the paper proposes the emerg-

ing service-oriented approach for developing an en-

vironmental software system for two important rea-

sons. (i) Technologies that can support the develop-

ment of service-oriented software are increasingly be-

ing used in delivering B2B (Business to Business),

e-Commerce and intra-enterprise distributed systems.

With new developments in web-based services, the

exchange of knowledge and software services across

value chain actors appears to be improving (Isen-

mann et al., 2004). (ii) Service-oriented environmen-

tal software systems can offer more advantages than

product-based or centralised knowledge-based (Carl-

son et al., 2001) software in meeting the evolving

needs of an environmentally responsible manufactur-

ing enterprise in adopting environmental best prac-

tices on a continual basis in a cost effective manner.

In Section 2, we derive the links between the busi-

ness functions of a manufacturing enterprise to re-

quired environmental tasks and the environmental

software services to be provided to carry out the tasks.

We discuss brieﬂy in Section 3 the guiding princi-

ples for developing service-oriented software models,

and derive a service-oriented model for the core en-

vironmental service of estimating the life cycle envi-

ronmental burdens of products, as viewed from the

perspective of a manufacturing plant. A short discus-

sion is provided in Section 4 on the use of service

models for developing service-oriented environmen-

tal software systems, with some comments on further

work. The paper is concluded in Section 5.

2 INTERNALISING THE

ENVIRONMENTAL

DIMENSION OF BUSINESS

The guiding principle followed in this paper is to

add the most appropriate environmental dimension

to each of the business functions of a manufacturing

company or enterprise, and to relate environmental

tasks to services for information delivery.

Materials production and manufacturing compa-

nies are required to meet many local or national envi-

ronmental regulations, and are also expected to con-

form to emerging international standards (ISO, 2005)

and best practices. The new international standards,

ISO 14000 series, recommend a framework that can

form the basis for adoption of environmental best

practices by companies. In order to meet local regu-

lations, and thus remain environmentally responsible

in a region, companies should report, and also, reduce

the environmental impact of their operations.

The core environmental impact that needs to be re-

duced by manufacturing companies to remain inter-

nationally competitive is the life cycle impact, which

represents the environmental footprint of manufac-

tured products over their product life cycles. As

shown in Figure 1, various materials and energy in

different forms are consumed in making products

from raw materials, and wastes and emissions result

throughout the life cycle of products. ISO 14040 se-

ries standards provide a framework for Life Cycle As-

sessment (LCA) of products. All the processes in

making, distributing and using the product, from the

cradle state to end of life, are considered in LCA. All

emissions to land, water and air associated with the

product are quantiﬁed to arrive at the life cycle in-

ventory. The materials in the life cycle inventory are

classiﬁed into various impact categories (e.g. green-

house or global warming, ozone depletion, summer

smog etc.). The life cycle impact of the product is ex-

pressed under chosen impact categories (e.g. Global

Warming Impact expressed as kg CO2/product).

LCA requires knowledge of processes and the

ﬂow of materials and energy throughout the prod-

uct life cycle chain. The current situation is

that LCA service is provided by expert consul-

tants. Also some LCA software products (SimaPro,

2005, http://www.earthshift.com/tools.htm) are avail-

able for use by experts within a company.

However, lack of relevant information and data to

conduct an LCA of a manufactured product over its

entire life cycle chain poses enormous difﬁculties. As

the estimation of the life cycle environmental impact

of a product requires data, information and knowledge

resident in several companies in the product value

chain, sharing knowledge across the companies and

actors of a product value chain becomes mandatory.

ICE-B 2006 - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON E-BUSINESS

Figure 1: Cradle to grave life cycle of a product.

Figure 2: Linking Environmental Services to Business

Functions.

Figure 3: Life Cycle Impact from a Plant Perspective.

Figure 4: Cradle-to-exit gate Product system for a diecast

product.

Furthermore, manufacturing companies often pro-

duce different components or products, and hence ma-

terials and components from one company may ﬂow

into many product life cycle chains. Thus, a company

may need to share information with others in different

product value chains, depending upon the product in

question.

The use of LCA may be for any of the fol-

lowing purposes: Public policy; Corporate goals;

Strategic planning; Product disclosure and Green la-

belling; Marketing; Process and product improve-

ments. Hence, LCA information needs to be pre-

sented in different details and forms to the various

users who may be conducting different tasks to ful-

ﬁl the purpose for which the LCA is intended.

2.1 Linking Environmental

Requirements to Business

Function

The business cycle of a manufacturing enterprise is

shown in Figure 2. The business cycle includes the

following: (i) Development of new products; (ii) Pro-

duction of products using processes in facilities with

materials and resources; (iii) Marketing the products

manufactured; and (iv) Evaluation of products in the

market place. This business cycle is accomplished by

performing several functions as shown in Figure 2:

Design and development of new products, processes

and integrated production systems; Production Plan-

ning; Purchase of materials for production; Produc-

tion and Quality Control; Marketing and Sales of

products; and Overall Governance and Management.

These functions may be performed in different func-

tional silos within an enterprise, using different types

of processes and tools to perform the tasks demanded

by the functions.

E-BUSINESS WITH SOFTWARE SERVICES FOR SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING

Figure 2 shows the links between the business func-

tions and the materials ﬂow associated with a manu-

facturing plant. The material loop in the ﬁgure shows

the ﬂow of materials within a plant, as well as outside

the plant. The materials ﬂow within the plant is char-

acterised by the following: all materials purchased

enter the store; from the store, materials enter produc-

tion lines as demanded by production planning; prod-

ucts are manufactured using manufacturing processes

and their quality assessed; and manufactured products

are stored as inventory for dispatch to other plants or

users. Outside the manufactured plant, the materials

loop consists of processes for production of raw mate-

rials outside the plant, transportation of raw materials

to the manufacturing plant, transportation of products

manufactured in the plant to users and/or other plants,

and recycling of used products to close the materials

loop. The overall material loop, which is responsible

for the environmental burdens caused by a manufac-

tured product, determines the life cycle impact of the

product. The addition of the environmental dimen-

sion to a manufacturing business results in many en-

vironmentally related functions and tasks that require

services. As all the business functions and services

shown in the table support the entire business cycle

of a sustainable manufacturing company, the different

services are essentially interlinked, and hence, need to

be integrated in developing the service-oriented soft-

ware system.

2.2 Core Environmental Services

For Sustainable Manufacturing

A new business function, called Environmental Man-

agement is required to internalise environmental is-

sues into business practices. This new business func-

tion requires certain core tasks, which can be fulﬁlled

by the two fairly large granular level core environ-

mental services, which are termed as Total Environ-

mental Quality Measurement Service (Task 1) and

Life Cycle Impact Service (Task 2). The Environmen-

tal Quality Measurement Service is aimed at provid-

ing quantitative information associated with the envi-

ronmental burdens. As shown in Figure 3, the ma-

terials and energy ﬂow through the part of the mate-

rials loop that is within the plant create environmen-

tal burdens, which may be allocated to the products

manufactured or the processes used, or to the total

plant itself. Although the various environmental bur-

dens are highly interlinked, we have divided the To-

tal Environmental Quality Measurement Service into

three independent services, viz. Product Environmen-

tal Quality Measurement Service, Process Environ-

mental Quality Measurement Service and Plant Envi-

ronmental Quality Measurement Service, to support

various business functions as dictated by the environ-

mental business policy of the company. For example,

if the company policy at some given time is to reduce

the environmental impact of the plant, then environ-

mental burdens resulting from the various locations

or processes within plant need to be measured, quan-

tiﬁed in terms of the units required by regulations,

and allocated to various locations so as to make ef-

fective measures for reducing environmental burdens.

The Plant Environmental Quality Service is aimed at

providing relevant information for improving the en-

vironmental performance of the company at the loca-

tion where the manufacturing plant is situated.

3 SERVICE-ORIENTED MODELS

FOR CORE ENVIRONMENTAL

SERVICES

Model-based approaches have been recommended by

researchers (Koehler et al, 2003) for realising ﬂex-

ible service-oriented software architectures to meet

any application need. These model-based approaches

allow achieving a seamless integration of software

service functionalities required by a business enter-

prise in developing a technical software solution. The

ﬁrst step in using the model-based approach is to

derive models for the software services to be pro-

vided to meet application requirements. Also, the

derived models should enable business functions to

be factorised as independent services, having clearly

deﬁned interfaces, which can be invoked in prede-

ﬁned sequences to form a business workﬂow process

(Koehler et al., 2003; Cardoso et al., 2004).

3.1 Deriving Software Models For

Environmental Services

We have derived service-oriented models to assist in

developing service-oriented environmental software:

Factorisation and service interactions: We have

considered requirements for further factorisation of

the services and the relevant interactions between sev-

eral services for any chosen service to support busi-

ness functions.

Autonomy, granularity and process awareness of

services (Dijkman and Dumas, 2004): The granu-

larity of service is considered at the environmental

task level so that a one-to-one correspondence can be

maintained between the software service to be pro-

vided and the environmental task to be conducted by

an actor. The process awareness of a software service

is included at the level of the procedures required to

perform the environmental task. Autonomy of a soft-

ware service is addressed by embedding the environ-

mental procedures and the information required into

ICE-B 2006 - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON E-BUSINESS

the service. While environmental procedures, based

on international standards, are generic to all enter-

prises or companies, the information and data are spe-

ciﬁc, and may even be conﬁdential, to a speciﬁc com-

pany. Hence, we have considered software service

models at the plant level of a company to provide au-

tonomy to software services.

Description of services: Each service is deﬁned by

the output information generated by the service; the

client or client service that receives the information;

the procedure used to produce the information; the in-

put information received from server services to carry

out the procedure and the output; and the server ser-

vices that provide the input information.

3.2 Model For Life Cycle Impact

Service

The Life Cycle Impact Service provides information

on the life cycle inventory and impacts associated

with a product for each of the product that is manufac-

tured in a plant. LCI Service needs to deliver informa-

tion to support many interlinked environmentally re-

lated tasks, such as reporting, design of products and

processes, purchasing etc. This information may be

provided to many clients, both inside and outside the

plant, via client services.

As shown in Figure 3, a plant that manufactures

a product is located between its own entry and exit

gates for materials ﬂow, and hence forms only one

element of the whole of life of the product. Hence,

the whole life cycle impact (Figure 3) of a product

can be estimated at the plant level only in partnership

with: (a) the suppliers of materials and energy, from

the upstream of materials ﬂow into the plant, for man-

ufacturing the product; and (b) the customers for the

product in the downstream of materials ﬂow from the

plant. As life cycle impacts are estimated on prod-

uct basis, it is necessary to exchange life cycle infor-

mation with the suppliers and customers correspond-

ing to the materials life cycle loop for the product in

question. A plant often manufactures many products,

and hence is a part of many product life cycle loops

(Loops #1and#2 shown in Figure 3), requiring inter-

action with suppliers and customers in different ma-

terials loop on a product basis.

Viewing from the plant perspective, the whole of

life cycle burdens (inventory or impact, in the par-

lance of Life Cycle Assessment based on ISO14040)

associated with a product consists of the following life

cycle gate burdens that contribute towards the whole

of life cycle impact (Figure 3): (i) Cradle-to-Entry

Gate life cycle burdens of the materials and energy

supplied to the plant by the suppliers for making the

product; (ii) Exit Gate-to-Whole of Life burdens of

the manufactured product as received by the product

customers in further transformation of the product,

use of product and closing the materials loop by re-

cycling (iii) Cradle-to-Exit Gate life cycle burdens of

the product which may be estimated by adding the

Entry Gate-to-Exit Gate burdens resulting from the

emissions produced by the plant in making the prod-

uct to the Cradle-to-Entry Gate burdens of the materi-

als and energy received by the plant. We have consid-

ered these three life cycle gate burdens in deriving the

model for the Life Cycle Impact Service, which has

three server services: Product Environmental Quality

Measurement (PEQM) Service, Supplier Service and

Customer Service.

An example of a product system is shown in Fig-

ure 4 for manufacturing aluminium components for

a car using the diecasting technology (Ramakrishnan,

2003).

4 MODEL-BASED APPROACH

FOR ENVIRONMENTAL

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

The proposed model-based approach for software de-

velopment requires establishing clear relationships

between the service models for the core environmen-

tal services to other client services in order to deliver

relevant information in the most appropriate way to

carry out the business functions of a sustainable man-

ufacturing enterprise. The services shown at a large

granular level need to be factorised, keeping in mind

the environmental business task required for a spe-

ciﬁc client application. The interconnections between

the various factorised services need to be described

in terms of clearly deﬁned interfaces, which need to

be invoked in speciﬁed sequences (Benatallah et al.,

2004; Milanovic and Malek, 2005) to produce the

workﬂow process to carry out the environmental task.

These actions form the basis for developing the re-

quired software.

The interconnections between the services can be

illustrated by means of an example for the LCI Ser-

vice model discussed earlier. In this example, we have

included a new client service, Report Service, which

requires the life cycle report of a product to provide

service for the task of purchasing materials and en-

ergy having low Cradle-to-Gate life cycle impact. For

the sake of illustration, we have included a Supplier

Registry service that can seek and ﬁnd green suppli-

ers.

A client application can invoke a service request

from the LCI Service directly and request LCI infor-

mation or invoke a Report Service, which in turn re-

quests LCI data. The Report service needs to accom-

modate various reporting requirements for corporate

internal clients (e.g. environmental manager or en-

E-BUSINESS WITH SOFTWARE SERVICES FOR SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING

vironmental auditor); external clients (e.g. partners

interested in purchasing products with low environ-

mental impact) or for government authorities (eg. for

governance purposes). LCI service provides details of

measured and estimated energy and wastes and emis-

sions from processes in making products (on product

by product basis). The Green Purchasing Service in-

terface requires the web method, get-supplier-impact-

data to be implemented by the Supplier Registry to get

the impact rating for an item. The Green Purchasing

Service interface requires another web method, get-

green-material to be implemented by the Supplier ser-

vice. The above illustration can be seen to correspond

to the current day requirements of voluntary reporting

and greening supply chains. Life cycle impact analy-

sis and various reporting requirements may need to be

split into subprocesses. The ensuing tangling of be-

haviours will be dealt with using a model-driven ap-

proach to aspect-oriented design in a service-oriented

architectural context (Chavez et al., 2005).

5 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Materials production and manufacturing are highly

important for the economic and social wellbeing of

modern society, but such activities are inherently en-

vironmentally burdensome. The concept of servicis-

ing a manufacturing business has been propounded by

experts in the ﬁeld of industrial ecology and adopted

by some companies to improve their environmental

performance. Information industry has already pro-

gressed well along the service-oriented path, driven

by the advancements in web-based technologies. Tak-

ing cognizance of these developments in two differ-

ent industry areas, we have offered some conceptual

thoughts for modelling the delivery of environmental

information to sustainable manufacturing businesses

and for synthesis into service-oriented software.

We have shown the links between the business

functions of a manufacturing enterprise and the envi-

ronmental requirements relevant to the business. We

have identiﬁed the core environmental tasks to be per-

formed by a sustainable manufacturing company. We

have derived a software service model at the manu-

facturing plant level for estimating the life cycle bur-

dens of a manufactured product by a company in part-

nership with other companies in the life cycle chain

of the product. Taking diecast automotive compo-

nents as a case study, we are currently following the

model-development approach for developing service-

oriented environmental software in implementation,

testing and validation. We believe the proposed ap-

proach could form the basis for developing future

software e-business to meet evolutionary sustainabil-

ity requirements faced by manufacturing companies.

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