The new economy is already upon us, causing obvious changes of growing complexity in the pattern of our living standards which we should overcome to win the competitive race to be reckoned with among the other nations of the world. Our success is measured, on the one hand, by our ability to produce higher volumes of goods and services with the same or lesser resources but on the other hand our national competitiveness is now based not only on productivity, but also on quality, variety, customization, convenience, timeliness, satisfaction and specific needs of customers and environmental obligations etc. What is important is people do not want to wait for the state-of-the-art products and services . they demand always something better for mass production prices in tune with the profound economic and social influences that are compelling them unceasingly. Central to these is the optimum utilization of flexible information based technologies in their various disguises, so vital to raise our industrial/manufacturing potential for achieving higher productivity and quality, tailor-made products and services for both big and small markets and even for individual customers. Additionally, a country has always to bear the brunt to integrate producers and consumers with economic networks and thereby create an environment in which goods and services can be delivered globally or locally in a convenient and timely way. Such team working which facilitates to shift fluidly . whether it concerns innovation off the drawing board, customization of a wide and ever changing assortment of products and services or reliance on shared information and responsibilities or even organization of jobs with segmented hierarchies or collective activity conducted by group. of people has always proved to be a dominant aspect to counter bottlenecks to embrace the future and solve hard choices and barriers in our economic and industrial transitions in line with the changing world trends. And all these demand that our efforts should sustain the test of time. If so, what do we mean by

.Sustainability.?.

1. To maintain essential ecological processes and life support systems (such as soil regeneration and protection, recycling of nutrients, and cleaning of waters)

2. To preserve genetic diversity (the range of genetic material found in the world's organisms) 3. To ensure sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems (notably fish and other wildlife, forests and grazing lands) Putting Sustainable Development into Practice .Sustainability transition. is the process of moving to a society which lives within environmental limits and is just and fair.

Material use in this century has been distinctive for two reasons. Materials have become increasingly complex. Today's stock, for example, draws from all the 92 naturally occurring elements in the periodic table, compared with just 20 or so at the turn of the last century. This allows material scientists to move well beyond the classic material forms of wood, ceramics and metals, but it also makes recycling difficult and introduces unprecedented toxicity to human and natural habitats. In addition waste is generated at far greater rates than in any previous era. Even late in the 20th century, when interest in recycling has surged, most materials moving through industrial economies are used only once, and then thrown away.

The features that have made the 20th century materially unique have also brought unprecedented damage to human and environmental health. Mining has contaminated thousands of kilometers of rivers and streams in the United States alone, and logging threatens vital habitat, often of endangered species. Air and water pollution from manufacturing plants have sickened millions, often shortening lives.

Some of the 100,000 synthetic chemicals introduced in this century are a ticking time bomb, affecting the reproductive systems of animals and humans even a generation after initial exposure. And the effort to make waste disappear by burying it, burning it or dumping it in the ocean, has generated green house gases, dioxin, toxic leakage and other threats to environment and human health.

All in all, this increased push and pull on industry will surely lead to very significant waste accumulation which necessarily requires elimination or re-use to improve the overall efficiency of the industry; hence a change in our outlook and practice is becoming very essential.

Challenging past practices and excuses involves, to a large extent, understanding the sources of waste. Waste exists in all work activities, all process tasks, and at all levels in the organization. Waste of information movement is concerned with unnecessary transfer of information between two or more dissimilar systems (computing systems or otherwise). Examples include conversion from one format to the other, upload and download of information, files retrieval and storage, unnecessary notification or notes, one-to-many communications instead of publicity (many-to-many), data security, etc. This completes the set of eight wastes shown below:

Many progressive companies are interested in maintaining a competitive edge in the world market and in producing high quality products. They would like to maximize the life cycle value of a product while containing costs and environmental burdens as shown in the design. The values, for example, include characteristics such is manufacturability, service ability, recyclability, and other environmental issues. They would like to manufacture the product at a cost much lower than their competitors. Life-cycle management (LCM) is a process often used to accomplish these goals. LCM is actually a transformation process from a set of raw resources to a useful product, energy or service that consumers want or intend to buy.

LCM includes not only the effective conversion of the raw resources into useful outputs but also the management of the waste resulting from it. There are two types of waste: i) waste from the process of transformation and the consumers, ii) waste that needs to be safely disposed or recycled.

To date, many companies view product realization as characterized by long lead times, a multitude of engineering changes, manufacturing complications and ultimately heavy costs to satisfy the customer requirements. The number of engineering changes that occur in the best US company is 40 to 60% more than the best Japanese company.

If the status of the United States is so appalling and alarming, it must be mind-boggling for a country like India where statistics on wastes are not available but where evidence is abounding.

If one carefully watches any organization or enterprise in India, it will not be difficult to get an insight into the magnitude of waste prevalent at each step. The magnitude of the loss and the pain inflicted on the society by industrial waste is antisocial, anti-national and criminal.

Most people are not intentionally bad. It is a general experience that more people commit mistakes out of ignorance or arrogance. The purpose of this retelling is to educate them about waste. Waste does not always appear distinctly and clearly as waste to everyone; hence we must learn the techniques and tools to identify and isolate waste.

In one sense, the whole idea of using process reengineering traits seems simplistic and easy, but its implementation in our concurrent product and process environment can be extremely difficult. Using a reengineering trait as an organizational strategy in CE is a long term commitment. It requires reviewing 8 types of wastes and rework in each new process each time a new change is introduced. The way the reengineering process is done traditionally takes a long time.

A typical approach that one can take in implementing reengineering in a CE environment, where product and process design are performed concurrently, is to begin with a multi-functional team analyzing the current process. The team identifies wastes and reworks and recommends a modified design of the new process that eliminates these wastes. Translating the .as-is. process into an optimum performing design can be done using any one of the process reengineering traits: CPI, restructuring or renovation .as described here. Reengineering is a cycle process. Identification of waste components in some processes may be taking place simultaneously while elimination of waste components in other processes is in progress. Once an optimum design of the "as-is" process is set, the product and process design conceptualization begins concurrently. The use of concurrent process reengineering in an integrated product development environment fosters engineering creativity while promoting higher grade process designs engineered in less time and lower cost.

By the middle of the 21st Century the world's population will nearly double to almost 10 billion. Today, we are not providing sufficient food for the world's population. Through inefficient practices, the quality of earth's soils, waters and air are jeopardized.

Mankind does not need to look to the future to see the folly of its actions, or more precisely, its inaction. The World Health Organization and other respected public health institutions are dedicated to forcing industrial nations to recognize the terrible Third World devastation caused primarily by food shortages. Is society responding to this terrible human tragedy? Malnutrition is the major contributing cause for the death of over 14,000 children per day.

Since the mid 1980s, N-Viro International Corporation has pioneered the use of mineral wastes for pasteurization, stabilization and metals immobilization of a variety of organic wastes. N-Viro Soil Achieves USEPA Class A Exceptional Quality Standards (EQS) are 2,000 times more stringent than conventional Class B Processes, such as digestion. N-Viro Soil's ability to immobilize metals is superior to other treatment alternatives.

The basic treatment approach is to use the chemical properties of these mineral wastes to destroy pathogens, reduce odours, immobilize heavy metals and nutrients, and to make soil-like products that can be used in agriculture, horticulture, reclamation and construction as solid conditioners, fertilizers, liming agents and soil substitutes. Mineral wastes used in these processes include cement kiln dust, lime dust, coal combustion ashes, wood ash and rock fines. Organic wastes treated with these processes include municipal sewage sludge, animal manure, paper mill sludge and other industrial organic wastes. In 1998, N-Viro and its licensees in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and Belgium processed more than one million tons of municipal sewage sludge at over 40 facilities. In 1998, N-Viro and USDA-ARS began testing the company's process for animal manure disinfection and brought this process to the market in 1999.

By 2025, urban waste will be more than quadrupled. Organic matter forms the bulk of the municipal waste; 36 percent of the waste flow in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member states is food or garden waste. Organic matter in developing countries accounts for a staggering 50 to 70 percent of the total waste stream. Lack of proper treatment of these waste streams is one of the most serious health issues confronting the world today.

One of the most important health issues with regard to wastewater treatment is the contamination of drinking waste by discharge of untreated sewage. This can cause widespread disease among those least able to seek medical care.

Heavy metals in sewage are a problem when solids are applied to agricultural land, but if the solids are not removed at all and discharges are untreated, the health of entire populations is threatened. Thus, adequate sewage treatment provides good, clean solids for agricultural use and safe discharges to protect drinking water.

As an alternative insight to the problems of the environment, we may have to adopt a more sober, less consumerist, less desire-oriented pragmatic and idealist style of life. As such, sustainable growth requires judicious use of precious natural resources and management of the impact rounding environment. Herein comes the most baffling challenge of achieving excellence in all spheres of business activities without affecting the harmony of mankind with nature. The coming decade will witness operational systems in space providing real time data on rain fall and help advance our knowledge of weather systems and processes. Our future water development programme has to go on exploring future scope for additional resources apart from harnessing the available resources and better management of existing ones. In structural terms, power sector utilities are endeavoring to unbundled the existing vertically integrated monopoly and separate generation, transmission and distribution activities for rationalizing their management.

The World Commission on Environment and Development in their report titled "Our Common Future" defined "Sustainable Development. as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Thus the definition contains within it two key concepts. The concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world's poor and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs". "Sustainability. is characteristic of a process or a state that can be mainly indefinite. Development focuses on the core concept of .qualitative improvement".

The goal of AMA is to discover and codify guiding principles for manufacturing, educate future leaders for the manufacturing workplace and otherwise infuse important principles and technologies into manufacturing practice.

Manufacturing has to be viewed as a broad-based activity ranging from product design through production, product use, maintenance, prevention and re-use of wastes, etc. But AMA recognizes as an interdisciplinary activity that it requires seamless integration of technology, management, information system, workforce etc, it approaches these aspects holistically rather than take rifle-shots at individual issues, to achieve quick fixes by bridging the traditional technology, management, workforce, etc with a broad understanding of manufacturing that integrates key functions and disciplines involved in creating, designing, making, selling/ servicing products, etc. It encompasses not only critical operations within a corporation, such as technology, product process engineering, administration and marketing/sales/services, but also vendors/suppliers, customers, community, Government etc. outside the corporation as shown below:

Thus, agile manufacturing enables a manufacturer to switch over fast from one product that is being produced to another product desired to be produced in a cost effective manner within the frame work of the system. Agile manufacturing includes the entire business process commencing from planning, finance and processes, design, tooling, machines and machinery layout to materials and inventory, waste prevention and elimination, cost specifications, price constraints, marketing and sales, services and support, quoting and delivery dates, etc.

During the last decade a large number of companies worldwide have invested large sums of money and years of effort to improve, streamline, reengineer ad reconfigure their supply chains since supply chain performance impacts the top line (increased margins due to reduced cost and improved asset management). However, the returns on these have been to the desired levels. The key reasons for this are :

• .Most improvement efforts to date have emphasized tactical efficiency in one piece/segment of the supply chain .

• Organizations have often undertaken long strategic reviews creating exciting visions but have failed to deliver value creating execution plans .

• The required human and organizational performance have not been factored into the execution plans or have been considered too late in the change process.

With a clear understanding of performance priorities and existing gaps, along with the corresponding value proposition, companies can define their respective journey plan which would  be essentially based upon a common platform and a company wide approach. Successful implementation of such a journey plan would lead a company to become a truly integrated enterprise which is the basic foundation for supply chain excellence.

In view of the welfare of the workforce which has been a vital component of the business, a system for long term education and training of the workforce is essential. Whereas the middle level and top level workforce can be deputed to institutions for higher learning as a part of quality improvement programme, the labour class will have to be provided in-house education and training programmes. Organizational pattern must be flexible enough to provide perfect cooperation among the three components of Agile Manufacturing:
Management, Technology and Workforce.