Environmental aspects in VSM: a study about barriers and drivers

Environmental and sustainable VSM are some of the recently most applied methods to integrate Lean and Green aspects of contemporary sustainability efforts. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate, guided by specialists in VSM, the main barriers and drivers for the application of VSM with environmental aspects. To achieve this goal, we conducted a literature review in order to identify the main barriers and drivers in VSM with environmental aspects' application. Thereafter, a survey was conducted with VSM specialists in order to identify, in their opinion, which are the main barriers and drivers to conduct a VSM with environmental aspects' application. Based on this, a descriptive statistical analysis was conducted and next, an in-depth correlation analysis among all pairs of drivers/barriers. The results showed the three most important barriers: (i) the difficulty in capturing all the information of different products in a single VSM; (ii) the difficulty of comparison between Sus-VSM across manufacturing systems in different contexts; and (iii) the lack of some critical information related to environmental aspects (water, energy, solid waste, etc.). With respect to the drivers, it was pointed out: (i) the importance of a well-defined method and ii) mapping methods saving time for users.