Towards a holistic sustainability index for measuring sustainability of manufacturing companies

Abstract

International audienceCompetition from low wage countries and the adoption of free market strategies have forced manufacturing firms to recognise and implement productivity enhancement strategies. This research defines a holistic sustainability index embedding several performance indices. The aim of this study was to establish a relevant framework that would assess the current situation of an industry through aggregation of environmental, social, economical as well as manufacturing variables. The proposition has its roots in trends and gaps in the sustainability literature of manufacturing industries and is based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. A list of indicators measuring the industry performance based on an AHP scoring methodology is proposed. The next stages include grouping industries according to common deficiencies across the four dimensions and establishing a cooperation framework. The food manufacturing industry is the main target in this study and will benefit from adopting sustainable long-term policies. By recognising the importance of social–environmental sustainability and taking the initiative to pursue it, profits will grow as a positive effect of such policies. The added value is twofold: (1) coupling all sustainability dimensions, often addressed in silos and (2) integrating manufacturing indicators which enable the analysis of interrelationships with sustainability

Proposal of a Sustainable Circular Index for Manufacturing Companies

“…This same method of aggregation used in this work, Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), was used in [149] to construct a Sustainability index for measuring the sustainability of manufacturing companies.…”

“…To maintain comparability between the existing and the new data, the composite indicator for the existing data must be re-calculated in such cases [132]. This same method of normalization was used in other works [149].…”

Introducing Sustainability in Value Models to Support Design Decision Making: A Systematic Review

“…One example is the Holistic Sustainability Index proposed by Harik et al [105], which uses AHP to classify a company's progress towards environmental, economic, social and manufacturing sustainability. Egilmez et al [106] propose, instead, an Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to devise a firm's eco-efficiency score.…”

The Influence of Higher Engineering Education Investment and Technical Progress on the Sustainable Development of Manufacturing Industry in China

“…To explore the direct influence and indirect conduction effect of higher engineering education investment and technical progress on the growth of manufacturing industry (Harik et al, 2015;Zhu, 2013), which has important practical significance to effectively identify the mutual influence of higher engineering education investment and technical progress on the sustainable development of manufacturing industry.…”