A holistic and rapid sustainability assessment tool for manufacturing SMEs

Sustainable development is a broad term and is complex in nature because it has three dimensions. While continuous management is necessary, especially for SMEs, there is a lack of easily applicable tools that assess the status of sustainability based on key performance indicators and that derive priorities for systematic improvement. Based on this information, this paper presents a holistic sustainability assessment tool for manufacturing SMEs. The tool is applicable on a factory level with reasonable effort, provides decision support for improvements and enables a cross-industry comparison. A case study at a Swedish company has been performed to verify the usability.