Sustainable development is driving corporations to shift from conventional business practices that focus on value creation for shareholders to sustainable business practices that focus on value creation for all stakeholders. Corporate contribution to sustainable development is known as sustainable value. Sustainable value can be divided to economic, environmental, and societal value, which is in line with the triple bottom-line concept introduced by Elkington (1998).
This chapter presented the ProdSI and ProcSI methodologies for sustainability assessment at the product and process levels. The ProdSI and ProcSI methods are metrics-based and have ninety and seventy-five metrics categorized into thirteen and six clusters, respectively. The sustainability clusters for product and manufacturing processes were summaries of past research. These metrics were introduced and the process to normalize, weight, and aggregate the measurements for these metrics to compute the ProdSI and ProcSI was explained. Finally, the application of the methodology was demonstrated through a case study to evaluate ProdSI and ProcSI for an automotive component. During this case study, an automobile component and its manufacturing processes are taken into consideration, where the whole procedure of preliminary target setting, data collection and allocation for each of the metrics, normalization of measurements, weighting, and aggregation is demonstrated. Such a case study can be taken as an example of self-assessment for sustained improvement, and benchmarked comparison requires further effort at each of the steps in the procedure to generate universal standards/baseline of evaluation. Future work will focus on applying the ProdSI and ProcSI methodologies to refine and customize the individual metrics’ sets for specific industries and application. It will also address weighting and normalization by involving industry experts, exploring different weighting methods and performing sensitivity analysis to examine the effect on overall sustainability evaluation.

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