Strengthening the Environmental Sustainability of Production Systems through Digitalization

Doctoral thesis, 2023

Industrial companies are facing incremental pressure to strive for environmentally sustainable development. This can be attributed to their increased contribution to energy consumption and carbon emissions and the growing international attention focused on global warming. Meanwhile, digitalization has been a promising approach to improving overall operational performance and has profoundly impacted the environment of production systems. However, digitalization has been prioritized for its economic opportunities over environmental benefits and needs to be studied to expand upon its implications for environmental sustainability.

Hence, this thesis aims to reveal the potential of digital technologies for production systems’ environmental sustainability by focusing on: 1) identifying the potential environmental benefits of using digital technologies and 2) identifying the mechanisms for using digital technologies to generate environmental benefits. These aims were achieved by adopting a practical manner and conducting four studies that mixed qualitative and quantitative methods and involved industrial partners. The data collection methods included interviews, onsite observation, questionnaires, focus groups and literature reviews.

The results consist of two parts. First, the main benefit shows that the application of digital technologies can generate environmental benefits primarily through greater resource and information efficiency in the production stage of a product life cycle. Furthermore, the IoT-related connection-level technologies have a relatively high degree of application throughout the manufacturing value chain. The application of VR is also identified as enhancing remote technical communication, thus reducing physical meetings and travel. Moreover, digitalized lean implementations can lead to reduced environmental impact, mainly through integrating IoT and related technologies with lean principles by improving visualization and communication, reducing deviations and monitoring waste generation.

Secondly, the mechanisms by which digital technologies generate the benefits consist of three elements, technological functions, enabled operations and impact pathways. Specifically, the technological functions include tracking and monitoring status, increased efficiency (production and communication), dematerialization and reduced transport (with reduced transport as a subordinate function compared to the first three). Enabled operations involve context-based examples which could be linked to the operational performance factors and be environmentally performance-driven. The impact pathways comprise prevention, reduction, optimization, reuse and substitution. From the observations in this research, the generation of environmental benefits using digital technologies usually starts with technological functions, which enable operations to reduce environmental impact through impact pathways.

Taken as a whole, this thesis deepens the understanding of using digital technologies to improve the environmental performance of production systems, thus contributing to sustainable manufacturing.