Abstract—The impact of lean management on environmental sustainability is the research line that receives the most attention from academicians. Therefore, the social dimension of sustainable development has so far received less attention. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of intra-plant lean manufacturing practices on social sustainability indicators extracted from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) parameters. The method is two-phased, including MCDM approach to uncover the most relevant practices regarding social performance and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) method to reveal the structural relationship among lean practices. Professionals from the academic and industrial fields answered the questionnaires. From the results of this paper, it is possible to verify that practices such as “Safety Improvement Programs”, “Total Quality Management” and “Cross-functional Workforce” are the ones which have the most positive influence on the set of GRI social indicators. Keywords—Indicators, ISM, lean, social, sustainability. I. INTRODUCTION T is relevant to know which are the fragilities of the social aspects in manufacturing industries, once that is the first step to accomplish a better work experience to the laborers. Since the announcement of Our Common Future report, in 1987, in which the concept of sustainability was defined, concerns on economic and environmental dimensions have emerged, while social dimension is still normally set aside, particularly in industrial environment. Sustainability is usually expressed in terms of Triple Bottom Line (TBL): people, profit and planet [1]. As people began to worry about the impacts of industrial activities on the environmental pillar by the 20 th century, the myth that protecting the environment was against industry profitability emerged [2]. However, stakeholders are constantly pressuring manufacturers to incorporate the social and environmental aspects within their production process in order to protect the environment and society from adverse repercussion of the manufacturing process [3]. Lean management is a business approach that hands over greater value for customers by removing non-value-adding activities [4]. The impact of lean on environmental Aline F. Marcon is with Production and Systems Engineering Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, 88040-900 Brazil (corresponding author, phone +5548988280047; e-mail: alinefmarcon@gmail.com). E. F. da Silva and M. Bouzon are with Production and Systems Engineering Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, 88040-900 Brazil (e-mail: efsilvaa@gmail.com, marinabouzon@gmail.com). sustainability is the research line that receives the most attention from researchers since 2001. Furthermore, the interest on this topic has increased in recent years and is presently the only line in lean management and sustainability that is widely studied [5]. Therefore, the social dimension of sustainable development has so far received less attention than the environmental dimension [6] and economic dimensions. Thereupon, the main objective of this research is to uncover the main lean intra-plant practices, which should be implemented in order to improve social sustainability indicators. II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In order to measure sustainability, many sets of indicators were developed. Among them, the GRI is considered to be the leading framework for sustainability reporting [7]-[11]. For this work, in order to measure the sustainable aspects, a group of sustainability indicators named G4 from GRI was selected. Only indicators which express the characteristics of the social dimension of sustainability in a firm’s scope were used; that is, external links were not considered due to the delimitation of this study. Considering the rising consciousness on environmental and social matters, lean approaches have lately incorporated concepts of social, economic and environmental sustainability [12]. Reference [13] bring a list of lean practices, from which we have extracted only the internal ones (door-to-door): Cross-functional Workforce (P 1 ), Continuous Flow Production/Just-in-time (P 2 ), Total Quality Management (P 3 ), Cellular Manufacturing (P 4 ), Preventive Maintenance (P 5 ), Process Capability Measurements (P 6 ), Safety Improvement Programs (P 7 ), Continuous Improvement Programs/Kaizen (P 8 ), Pull System/Kanban (P 9 ), Cycle Time Reduction (P 10 ), Lot size reduction (P 11 ), Lot size reduction (P 12 ), Bottleneck removal (P 13 ) and Quick changeover techniques (P 14 ). Reference [14] has proposed a new lean principle: sustainability; and endorses that organizations should consider the savings, environmental impact and so potential earnings of sustainable lean initiatives. Reference [15] stated that most research associating lean operations to sustainability issues have concentrated exclusively on environmental impacts and [12] verified that the social dimension is the one which drew the least attention from researches when compared to the environmental and economic pillars. Impact Assessment of Lean Practices on Social Sustainability Indicators: An Approach Using ISM Method Aline F. Marcon, Eduardo F. da Silva, Marina Bouzon I World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Vol:13, No:5, 2019 527 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 13(5) 2019 ISNI:0000000091950263 Open Science Index, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Vol:13, No:5, 2019 waset.org/Publication/10010310