Measuring industrial sustainability performance: Empirical evidence from Italian and German manufacturing small and medium enterprises

Abstract

Measuring industrial sustainability performance in manufacturing firms is still a major challenge for both policy and industrial decision makers, with many firms, particularly small and medium enterprises, struggling to properly engage with them. Hence, to understand the level of adoption of industrial sustainability indicators and the issues preventing their effective measurement, and stimulate further research in this area, a multiple case analysis of 26 small and medium manufacturing enterprises across Germany and Italy operating in the chemical and metalworking sectors was conducted. The findings show that only 18 indicators are in place on average. Furthermore, too many firms still focus almost exclusively on the economic pillar of sustainability, while social and environmental pillars are addressed almost exclusively for compliance with legislation. Moreover, the research suggests that contextual factors may influence the firms' perspective on sustainability and the way it is managed, as well as the certifications held by firms, influencing, in turn, the number and types of indicators considered. An exploratory investigation allowed identification of several important open issues, leading to future research avenues, and in particular towards the development of a novel model to gauge sustainability in industrial activities, as well as adoption of policy-making measures for further emphasis on environmental and social pillars when promoting the adoption of sustainability indicators.

Industrial sustainability performance measurement systems: A novel framework

“…In particular, he underlined that it was "very well balanced" and appreciated that "many indicators in the environment and social area can also tell you a lot about economic performance". Such a result represents an important finding, since it shows the need to develop an ISPMS that is able to gather indicators related to multiple pillars of sustainability in operations, as previous research has noted (Howard et al, 2018;Trianni et al, 2019). Moreover, the Operations Manager of Firm 4 stated that the model can "clarify all the aspects related to sustainability also to the sloppiest industrial decision-makers", while the Technical Director of Firm 5 appreciated the fact that the ISPMS is "a comprehensive measurement system, able to give you a snapshot of your situation".…”

“…threshold has yet been reached. Some authors limit to 5-9 indicators (Collins et al, 2016), others to 10-20 (Krajnc and Glavič, 2003), or 30 (Siskos, 2014), or up to 36-60 (Globerson, 1985), while some others suggest there is not a correct number, but too many indicators could distract from following a focused strategy (Epstein and Widener, 2010;Trianni et al, 2019). Nevertheless, a complete overview of the sustainability performance requires a large number of indicators, which in turn may negatively affect the decision-making process (Medini et al, 2015).…”

Sustainability Analysis of Manufacturing Industry

“…As well, Kluczek [4] notes that methods that are commonly applied for assessment of the sustainability of the manufacturing industry lack in considering all three pillars of sustainability. Recently, [6] applied multi-criteria analysis to assess sustainability of an automotive industry and [14] analysed small and medium enterprises in Germany and Italy. In addition to those contributions, the current research aspires to evaluate the sustainability of whole subsectors of manufacturing at the national level.…”

Sustainability performance indicators: Definition, interaction, and influence of contextual characteristics

“…Thus, SPIs serve as a learning tool by management to improve decision‐making processes and integrate stakeholders (SP_LTI). Trianni, Cagno, Neri, and Howard (2019) consider that SPIs can be used as a tool for benchmarking, a systemic learning process based on the continuous comparison among operators in the same or related sectors. As learning tools, SP_LTIs often focus on organizations within the same industry, but tend to ignore the influence of cultural and legal characteristics (Haffar & Searcy, 2018).…”