Bill of sustainability: integrating life cycle assessment into bill of materials and operations for sustainable manufacturing

Abstract

Managing sustainability-related data for a wide range of products systematically and efficiently is a challenge for manufacturing companies. While manufacturing execution systems (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems maintain up-to-date information on process and raw material batches, this data is traditionally disconnected from environmental impact quantification. This paper presents the concept of the bill of sustainability (BOS), a framework that integrates a generic bill of materials and operations with life cycle assessment (LCA) to enable a product-portfolio-level system that can report product-instance-level sustainability data. Unlike conventional LCA, which operates post-analysis, the BOS framework facilitates environmental-informed decision-making during production and planning by mapping materials and operations to a standardised environmental impact database. The framework is validated through a software prototype and a case study on electric motor variants, demonstrating its ability to calculate climate change impacts across product configurations. The results indicate that BOS is scalable to handle high-variety manufacturing, connecting operational logistics and environmental accounting. The system has been piloted with a group of metalworking machine and electric drives companies, and the results have been reported.