Use Sustainability Metrics to Guide Decision-Making

The metrics presented in this paper are designed to meet the following criteria: (1) simple - not requiring large amounts of time or manpower to develop; (2) useful to management decision-making and relevant to business; (3) understandable to a variety of audiences, from people in operations to finance to strategic planning; (4) cost-effective in terms of data collection; (5) reproducible - incorporating decision rules that produce consistent and comparable results; (6) robust and non-perverse - indicating progress toward sustainability when improvement has in fact been made; (7) stackable along the supply chain so they are useable beyond the particular fenceline for which the calculation was performed; and (8) protective of proprietary information - preventing the back-calculation of confidential information.