Modeling enablers of environmentally conscious manufacturing strategy: An integrated method

Environmentally conscious manufacturing (ECM) has become an ever-more important strategy for most manufacturing companies to enhance the sustainability of their business. The successful adoption of environmentally conscious manufacturing strategy (ECMS) requires identifying a variety of crucial enablers and understanding their relationships of ECM strategy. However, most previous studies do not consider the interrelationships between enablers, and lack the mechanism of manipulating the vagueness in the decision-making process, which leads to the inaccurate identification of enablers. Thus, to solve these problems, an integrated method based on DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) and rough set theory is developed in this paper. The method integrates the strength of DEMATEL in dealing with interactions between factors and the ability of rough set theory to manipulate uncertainty. Finally, the method is applied to analyze the enablers of ECMS in an equipment manufacturing company to reveal the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. The "corporate social responsibility motivation" is identified as the most critical enabler for the case company in implementing ECMS, and it is influenced by other ECMS enablers including "environmental protection equipment" and "environmental design technology".