Abstract
Sustainable development (SD) is not just a global concern but an urgent and significant one that demands immediate attention. This urgency underscores the importance of our research, which focuses on sustainable manufacturing as a key driver towards achieving this crucial goal. Measuring sustainability in manufacturing is a complex task, but it is a task we must undertake. Thankfully, sustainability assessments provide a powerful tool to monitor and measure sustainability in organisations, enabling the identification of sustainable opportunities and necessary changes. However, the current sustainability assessment tools and methodologies for manufacturing organisations must be completed, and relevant assessment information must be included. Therefore, the need for a comprehensive tool that offers a standard sustainability assessment of manufacturing organisations with relevant indicators is not just critical; it is paramount.
This paper presents a rigorous review of manufacturing sustainability, employing an indicator-based approach to develop a comprehensive understanding of conducting sustainability assessments in manufacturing organisations. The indicator-based decision-makers are not just constructed but meticulously constructed, with each detail carefully considered and incorporated from multiple frameworks in the literature. This meticulous construction ensures the robustness and reliability of our research, instilling confidence in our findings. To ensure the relevance of the manufacturing indicators, a quantitative survey was conducted with the utmost precision, using rigorous sampling methods and data collection techniques. The data was then analysed using descriptive statistics, further enhancing the robustness of the research.
The research outcomes include a sustainability assessment framework, a selection criterion for indicators and a list of relevant sustainability indicators that can be used in manufacturing organisations. This research can provide significant inputs to improving sustainability in manufacturing organisations. The indicators identified in this research study can be used to communicate the organisation's current sustainability status and assist decision-makers in identifying sustainability issues. Furthermore, the research study adds to the current knowledge of sustainability assessments in manufacturing organisations.