Identifying the perspectives for sustainability enhancement : A text mining approach for a machining process

Purpose Integrating sustainability strategies with business processes is the most challenging task for industry professionals due to the lack of a proper understanding of sustainability concepts. At the same time, a lack of proper guidance restricts them from pursuing such activities. As far as the aspects of implementation are concerned, it is very tough to analyse and pick up key points to start with. The purpose of this paper is to utilize a text mining approach to analyse qualitative data and identify the critical issues for implementing sustainability in the manufacturing sector by focussing on turning processes based on the survey responses of researchers and industry professionals. Design/methodology/approach An integrated method employing principal component analysis (PCA) and the k-means clustering algorithm has been applied to extract useful information from a set of various suggestions provided by both the groups surveyed. The textual data has also been visualized using word clouds and, thus, it has been compared with the results of the text mining approach. Findings The results of the study indicate the importance of the role of government organizations and the need for a skilled workforce, which are crucial for enhancing aspects of sustainability in the manufacturing sector, as supported by both researchers and industry professionals. Besides this, researchers have highlighted the need to focus more on environmentally related issues, whereas industry professionals have raised performance-related issues. Practical implications The findings of the study present the important concerns of both the groups towards sustainability initiatives and, thus, will help to enhance the understanding of the underlying possibilities of negotiating jointly to enhance the performance of machining processes. Originality/value The novelty of this paper lies in its identification of important initiatives that are having a direct impact on the sustainable aspects of the machining process, based on the views of researchers and industry professionals.