Readiness self-assessment of cement industry for sustainable manufacturing implementation: A case study of India

Abstract

An important first step when embarking on the sustainability improvement journey is readiness assessment. Performing readiness assessment is a systematic analysis of an organizations’ abilities to undertake the potential sustainability improvement initiatives by identifying the weak areas of the organization and helps to mitigate or close these weak areas before the implementation. However, the cement manufacturing industry is a key player in Indian industry and involves many environmental, social and economic impacts. The cement manufacturing process is also a high energy and resource consuming process. The current study assessed the readiness of Indian cement industry for the overall sustainability improvement. The model provided by Sangwan et al. (2018) for sustainability readiness self-assessment has been adapted for the assessment. An offline survey among a cross functional team of experts from a large cement company was carried out for collecting data on the readiness assessment questions along with real time observations at different plant locations of the company. It is observed that the case organization is doing well and is ready for adopting sustainability improvement initiatives but it needs to focus on developing water related policies for better sustainability. The results provide a complete visualization for the sustainability improvement initiatives in terms of seven resources of air, water, infrastructure, energy, material, money, and people. This readiness assessment tool was found to be simple to use by the managerial/supervisory level employees for the self-assessment of organizational preparedness.