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To define good KPIs it is useful to generate a sheet with all relevant characteristics
of a KPI such as name, unit, data, formula, reporting frequency and level, definition or
interpretation. An example is shown in Figure 3.9.
Figure 3.9 Example of KPI definition sheet: delivery reliability
From a methodological point of view, it is quite easy to integrate “sustainable”
KPIs in a KPI system as they can be simply integrated into the system as new KPIs. But
from the point of view of the satisfaction of the above mentioned requirements, there
are some challenges arising, especially in the field of availability of data and robustness.
Measures of corporate sustainability performance are highly variable across published
studies and are mostly limited to the availability of quantitative data. They can be based
on the amount of information disclosed (disclosure-based) or actual environmental, social
and governance performance. The disclosure-based performance measures were based
on Bloomberg’s Environmental Social Governance analysis of third-party information
from the Global Reporting Initiative or other sustainability disclosures of the company,
which were converted into a Bloomberg scoring system. A source for performance-based
sustainability measures is KLD Research & Analytics, commonly referred to as KLD
STATS (Academic Ratings Data). It provides a historical overview of a company’s CSR
(Corporate Social Responsibility) activities, being divided into strengths and concerns and
rated using a binary system, “1” (present) and “0” (absent). The activities address CSR
categories of community, human rights, corporate governance, employee relations, human
rights, product, environmental issues and involvement in controversial business issues. In
all of these categories, the ratings are either categorised as strengths or concerns.
Other measures of business sustainability are for example input-output life-cycle
analysis, hybrid life-cycle analysis, and “environmetrics”. They represent some of the
more rigorous and quantitative methods in industrial ecology to translate environmental
performance to economic metrics [28].
Sustainable metrics in a supply chain context are not yet covered in the literature
to a great extent. An overview of existing literature is given by Hassini et al. [21]. In
a comprehensive framework they propose the use of metrics that are firstly collected
by every supply chain partner in the three dimensions: economic, environmental and