Development of Sustainability Indicators for Employee-Activity Based Production Process Using Fuzzy Delphi Method

Production process sustainability refers to a manufacturing system in which manufacturing industries produce products in a sustainable way. In recent years, sustainability has become a major concern and challenge for manufacturing systems because of growing consciousness of the effects of their activities on the environment, society, and economy. Different organizational reports and the academic literature have proposed indicators of sustainable manufacturing that help to measure product and process sustainability. However, little of the previous research is related to employee-activity based indicators for production process sustainability. To bridge the gap, this study identified a set of indicators of production process sustainability based on direct and indirect impacts of manufacturing activities on employees, who are key resources in the entire production process, for efficiently applying a sustainability perspective. In addition, the paper provides an evaluation model for selecting relatively important indicators based on expert opinions. A fuzzy Delphi method was applied for the screening process of the decision makers (experts). A Delphi questionnaire prepared with a nine-point linguistic scale corresponding to respective linguistic variables was utilized to assess expert opinions on the importance of each indicator. These expert opinions were aggregated for each indicator by using an adopted algorithm that considers the degree of importance allocated to the decision makers, and the similarity and distance among decision maker opinions. Lastly, the key employee-activity based indicators were chosen based on the threshold value set.