Author: S. Vinodh
, Govind Mulanjur & Arjun Thiagarajan
Summary:
The contemporary manufacturing organisations recognise sustainability as an important concept for survival in the competitive scenario. Sustainability addresses triple bottom line namely profitability, people and planet. The concept selection in the context of sustainability is a typical multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The case organisation needs to select the best concept among five concepts which are used to infuse sustainability during early product design and development phases. The decision-makers of the case organisation felt that technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is the appropriate MCDM technique for sustainable concept selection. The decision-makers’ inputs have been gathered and the various steps in TOPSIS have been executed. Based on the distance of each concept from ideal and anti-ideal solutions as well as on the basis of closeness index, the concept Environmental Conscious Quality Function Deployment is found to be the best concept. The selected concept has been subjected to implementation. The results derived from the study indicated that TOPSIS is an effective approach towards sustainable concept selection.
