Matching “environmental performance” and “quality performance” : A new competitive business strategy through global efficiency improvement

Purpose – Enterprises are used to managing quality together with productivity but neglecting environmental management. This involves higher costs and lower benefits than if they were managed jointly. Therefore, efforts must be made to link all of the main aspects of the global performance/efficiency. In recent years several methodologies have been developed and implemented to consider and sort out single aspects of performance (concurrent engineering, quality function deployment, rapid prototyping, lean production, design for assembly and disassembly, total quality management, LCA) seeks to propose a method to attain such a result, within a continuous improvement environment. Design/methodology/approach – The method is based on the correlation between 12 aspects of performance/efficiency in the production processes, general specifications of the project, detail specifications for sub‐systems, and productive modalities. Findings – It is found that this can be done by constructing specific matrices, by utilizing both technical and economic data, which permit to identify the modifications to introduce in the process/product to improve the various aspects of performance. Originality/value – The way to follow is necessarily the adoption of methodologies able to integrate all aspects, to pursue and achieve an increasing efficiency.