From cleaner production and value management to sustainable value

Being part of an institution, where the main objective is research and its application to support enterprises in their challenges to improve competitiveness, innovation and sustainable development, leads to the dialogue between different research teams about the tools used and the results obtained. When the results of applications of cleaner production (CP) and value analysis (VA) were confronted, the possible synergies between them, the benefits of a joint approach and the complementarities seemed apparent and worth a research work, where these aspects could be developed. Bringing together the different experiences in the application of CP and VA and the state of the art of those methodologies, a new approach – sustainable value (SV) – was developed, materialised in a manual and tested in several companies. The results show the great potentiality of using this approach within companies namely in what concerns the reduction of useless and unnecessary efforts (and resources), and encourage the orientation of limited resources towards areas, where they can lead to SV increase and to attain sustainability.