SusPOM - Sustainable Production and Operations Management

Content:

Scarcity of resources, increasing ecologic awareness, and stricter environmental legislation are putting pressure on firms to rethink their processes and business models. The module presents concepts and techniques to improve the ecological footprint without jeopardizing profitability.

The module gives an overview of the most important tasks related to sustainable production and operations management in different industry environments. The first part of the module discusses state-of-the-art methods for modelling and decision making in the context of sustainable operations. Drawing on these methods, we discuss planning approaches for the resource and energy aware design and operation of production systems. In the second part, we discuss the concept of product-service-systems and its contribution to sustainable operations. We consider issues related to the design and planning of such systems and present several techniques to resolve these issues. Case studies and various practical examples from different industries are used for illustration and exercise reasons.

Central issues include:

• How does the concept of sustainability transfer to production?
• How can decisions be guided towards improving the sustainability of operations?
• What is the contribution of POM to improve the energy and resource efficiency of single processes, plants and value chains?
• How do product-service-systems relate to sustainable operations and what can be done to effectively manage such systems?

Other students especially liked this:

• super relevant topic
• acquisition of specialist knowledge
• international group of students
• field trips and guest lectures