Most of the manufacturers and businesses that try to cut down on their wastages, reduce their energy usage and improve their sustainability efforts in their manufacture and other processes undergo the problem of choosing the right concept from a range of available green options.
A number of business units try improving their green performance due to incentives or due to compulsions. Some such practices include bringing down the cost of production, cutting down the amount of scrap and following the regulatory requirements. A recent survey indicates that nearly 70% of the organizations will try to invest more on sustainability efforts in the current year.
According to Rachuri Sudarsan, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the availability of a number of regulatory and voluntary sustainability standards, continue to pose difficulty in choosing the appropriate standard for a manufacturing line. The time and resource consuming process of finding the right standard haunts the medium and small enterprises. He explained that these enterprises need to know what to measure and how, and in what manner the reported data can be verified and validated before choosing the right standard suiting their organization.
In order to assist such manufacturers and businesses NIST researchers have introduced a modeled frame work to assist organizations of all types to evaluate and introduce green standards that are suitable for their functioning and interests. The Zachman framework developed in eighties and adapted by the NIST team currently determines various organizational frameworks to categorize and arrange the information and data. Recently, the Zachman framework has been deployed to explain and classify the difficult standards for cyber security and health-care.
The tailor-made frame work of NIST allows the users to view and understand the green standards from their point of view to implement. Complex and difficult to understand standards are split into six different levels to enable easy understanding of the data from the perspective of a user for implementing. Further, the data is simplified to answer the six questions such as what, how, when, who, where and why and the results are placed in the form of a 36-cell arrangement.
The NIST is planning to showcase their framework and other green standards at the 18th CIRP International Conference on Life Cycle Engineering, to be held in Braunschweig, Germany on 4th May 2011.