There is an urgent need for the automotive inductry to explore strategies and methods to accelerate the industrial efficiency progress and support decision making in order to regain profitability. At the same time, decision making should not be made strictly from a view of productivity and investment cost. Manufactures worldwide are taking steps towards more sustainable manufacturing. Sustainability, in terms of "Energy Efficiency", "Lean", "Lead Time Efficiency" and other forms of reuse/conservation of resources has become a paramount factor that needs to be considered not only during the operational stage but from the very first day a production system is designed or configured. Therefore, to optimise a manufacturing system today is not only about maximising capacity and minimising costs, it is also about minimising energy use, minimising loss, minimising manufacturing lead time and other sustainability measures. The aim of the presentation is to introduce an innovative simulation-based optimisation and knowledge elicitation methodology for decision-making support within the production systems lifecycle to increase the profitability (increasing cost effectiveness) and simultaneously sustainability (increasing energy efficiency, reducing losses/wastes and shorten Order to Delivery Time) of the Swedish manufacturing industry. The methodology is so called Holistic Simulation Optimisation (HSO) because unlike today's industrial practice that productivity, cost and sustainability are optimised separately, the framework proposed takes into account productivity, cost, and sustainability in a multi-level and multi-objective context. The HSO methodology is realised through the development of a software toolset that synergistically integrates Discrete Event Simulation with the sustainability and cost models that have been developed or extended by industrial companies with state-of-the-art multi-objective optimisation and data mining technologies. The potential benefits of using the HSO methodology on the efficiency of the production systems that are measurable and can be verified quantitatively are: 5-15% increase in productivity; 10-20% reduction in manufacturing lead time; reduction in environmental wastes, in terms of energy use and other forms of losses (10-20%). The paper will present how these estimations are based on the case studies conducted in Swedish automotive industry.