Sustainability Indicators for the Product Development Process in the Auto Parts Industry

The severe environmental degradation caused by human activities in recent decades has forced organizations, especially those related to the auto parts industry, to take actions and measures in order to reduce or eliminate the negative effects caused by industrial activities. Those measures aim to cover various aspects within companies, and require an appropriate measurement system for the verification of their effectiveness. In this sense, sustainability indicators have grown in importance because they allow assessing the level of sustainability from various entities, identifying the potential for improvement and the progress achieved. Despite the great variety of existing indicators, there are still unexplored areas, such as indicators for product development. The present paper proposed a set of sustainability indicators, aiming to contribute to the creation of more sustainable products and guiding the development process from the earliest stages of product development. This set of indicators, which were divided into product and design indicators, were defined based on the best practices and recommendations from various techniques such as design for environment and sustainability, and the study of existing sustainability indicators. While product indicators present a technical character, as they provide means for evaluating the product characteristics in a quantitative way, design indicators present a managerial approach, in order to assess whether the main aspects and techniques of design for sustainability are being considered throughout the development process, in a qualitative way. The result was a set of 23 product indicators and 26 design indicators, including metrics that were simplified and adapted according to the characteristics and requirements of each phase of a product development process. The proposed indicators were applied on the development of a new component for the auto parts industry and demonstrated to be very useful in guiding the development team to design sustainable products.