Towards sustainability assessment: Reference data model for integrated product, process, supply chain design

Abstract

Sustainability is an emerging factor companies are called for considering in their business according to the growing people-awareness about the impact of their behaviour as customers against environmental, social and economic issues. However, companies seldom manage to focus on sustainability all along the design and decisional process due to lack of proper sustainability measurement systems and/or inability to propagate this analysis on all the actors involved in the extended production system defmition.This paper presents a novel approach aimed at supporting an integrated product, production system and supply chain design for sustainability. This goal will be pursued by, flrst, providing the system architecture of a system that supports the design activities taking place at the abovementioned three levels and, second, a data model encompassing all the required entities of the design for implementing the sustainability assessment.Keywords Sustainability, data model, assessment model, product development, supply chain.

Testing and Verification of a New Corporate Sustainability Assessment Method for Manufacturing: A Multiple Case Research Study

“…There is still a lack of comprehensive assessment models and tools covering all three aspects of sustainability in a holistic approach [91,92].…”

“…Furthermore, shortcomings and challenges of SA are in general also present in CSA tools, as a type of SA. These shortcomings were previously presented in [85], based on the systematic literature review [26,28,29,36,39,[50][51][52]60,62,63,73,77,84,[86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97].Sustainability 2018, 10, 4121 4 of 40One of the challenges of CSA is a selection of the 'right' indicators since these have a direct effect on the decision-making and the ability of tools to address a company's context. Companies often select sustainability indicators that are based on their strategy or type of business.…”

Multidimensional environmental social governance sustainability framework: Integration, using a purchasing, operations, and supply chain management context

“…• "no comprehensive models and tools covering all three [ESG] aspects of sustainability in a holistic approach" (Bettoni, Alge, Rovere, Pedrazzoli, & Canetta, 2012;Poveda & Lipsett, 2011;Singh, Murty, Gupta, & Dikshit, 2012);…”

“…Other shortcomings, identified with most sustainability frameworks, include, but are not limited to, the following: “no useful method for integrated sustainability on the company level” (Krajnc & Glavič, ); “no comprehensive framework of sustainability criteria for assessing sustainability of manufacturing companies” (Krajnc & Glavič, ); “existing tools miss a holistic approach on sustainability” (Hasna, ); “existing frameworks for indicators are aimed at external reporting, rather than providing valuable information for internal decision makers” (Feng & Joung, ); “current solutions tend to mix sustainability performance of a company and sustainability oriented practices” (Schneider & Meins, ); “no comprehensive models and tools covering all three [ESG] aspects of sustainability in a holistic approach” (Bettoni, Alge, Rovere, Pedrazzoli, & Canetta, ; Poveda & Lipsett, ; Singh, Murty, Gupta, & Dikshit, ); “no clear framework for measures and metrics at strategic, tactical, and operational levels in sustainable business development” (Gunasekaran & Spalanzani, ); “inability to provide a practical approach for the companies to identify improvements and possible sustainability‐oriented practices” (Despeisse, Oates, & Ball, ; Smith & Ball, ); “sustainability tools may appear too theoretical and abstract” (Rosen & Kishawy, ; Singh et al, ); “lack of tools that assess the status of sustainability, based on key performance indicators, and that derive priorities for systematic improvement” (Chen, Thiede, Schudeleit, & Herrmann, ); “companies measure what is measurable, rather than what is necessary, due to the challenge of simultaneously, addressing organizational context and sustainability phenomenon” (Hák, Janoušková, & Moldan, ); and “use of incomprehensive and unsystematic lists of indicators for sustainability in manufacturing” (Hallstedt, ). …”