State of Sustainability Report: Manufacturing Process Improvement Edition

The manufacturing process improvement category includes raw materials and approaches that enable the repurposing of resources. These changes allow often wasted resources, like water or energy, to be reused or repurposed in a different manner in the manufacturing process.

Currently, 69% of survey respondents report making manufacturing process improvements, with another 12% planning to make such improvements in the coming three years. Twenty percent have not and do not have plans to make these changes.

The adoption of these materials varies widely from country to country. Nearly 90% of Brazilian respondents use them already, as do 83% of those from the United States and 80% of Mexican respondents. On the other end of the spectrum, fewer than half of Italian respondents report using materials for manufacturing process improvement at this time. 

A wide variety of benefits motivate businesses to undertake sustainable manufacturing process improvements. Nearly a quarter of survey respondents say that competitive advantage is the main driver of these practices, while another 17% find technical to be the most important benefit of this sustainability area. Many others are primarily motivated by reduced material costs (13%), customer/consumer demand (12%), environmental impact (11%), regulatory compliance (8%), and reduced maintenance stops (8%). Most of these factors were also called value-adds by large numbers of practitioners, as was energy savings. 

“With manufacturing process improvement, we are talking about optimising how we do things today for a sustainable benefit,” says Attila Husar, Director of Filtration in Industrial Solutions, IMCD Canada. “This opens up an incredible amount of doors because there is not a one-size-fits-all solution.”

Pricing is the most difficult aspect of making these improvements, according to 41% of respondents who have done so. Functionality is the chief concern for another 25% of them, and 22% most struggle with availability. Functionality proved to be an unusually common problem in Germany, with 61% of German respondents calling this the chief challenge in the area of manufacturing process improvements.

Respondents who are not yet using materials for manufacturing process improvements most commonly struggle with finding alternative materials appropriate to their industries (33%) and knowing which materials to use (33%). They are most likely to start using these materials in the future due to customer / consumer demand (25%) and in the hopes it will bring competitive advantage (21%). 

Materials for manufacturing process improvements are much more popular in the Americas. Eight-five percent of respondents from the Americas are already using these materials, compared to 59% in EMEA. Twenty-eight percent of EMEA respondents report no future plans to begin using these materials, while all but 7% of American respondents expect to have them in place within the next three years.  

Technical performance appears to play a much more prominent factor in manufacturing process improvements in the Americas, with 28% of respondents there calling it the primary driver, compared to just 8% in EMEA. Those in the Americas were also more likely to call environmental impact a driver (13% compared to 7%). EMEA respondents more often said they were driven by material costs (17% compared to 8%) or customer / consumer demand (17% compared to 7%).  

Just under a quarter of survey respondents in each region said competitive advantage drove their efforts in this area.  

Overall, respondents in the Americas and EMEA struggled with similar aspects of this sustainability area, though pricing was a more common complaint in the Americas (48% compared to 35%). Functionality was named the primary challenge by a slightly larger share of EMEA respondents (28% compared to 22%).

The smallest businesses appear to lag behind larger ones in this area. Sixty-three percent of respondents from companies with fewer than 100 employees report using materials for manufacturing process improvement, compared with 76% of respondents from mid-size companies and 70% of those from the largest companies saying the same. 

Overall, survey respondents ranked manufacturing process improvements the second-to-last most impactful sustainability area for the next few years.

But while these materials may not cause the most dramatic or rapid change, their impact will accrue over time as manufacturing processes are transformed.

Most respondents feel they are well-versed in this sustainability area, with 29% calling themselves experts and another 45% saying they have intermediate knowledge of the field. That, and the relatively high rate of adoption of these materials, suggests that positive changes in manufacturing processes will continue to build.