Advanced Sustainability Action Plan: Supporting manufacturing SMEs on a sustainability pathway

The manufacturing industry faces numerous challenges: increasing energy and material costs, limited resources availability, customers' and legal requirements on product quality, climate action, social standards. An example for a political and regulative push is the European Green Deal and the Industry 5.0 strategy announced by the European Commission, which requires manufacturing enterprises to take actions to improve sustainability. Especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) require support to identify potentially suitable actions to implement. This paper proposes a guided decision support method for SMEs to help them on the sustainability pathway. With a multi-step procedure, the current status of a specific company regarding sustainability actions, their development goals, challenging fields of action, plans and interests in application of advanced technologies and social or environmental services can be identified. Starting from a questionnaire-based self-assessment, relevant fields of actions are derived and potential advanced technologies, social innovations and environmental services are identified. The developed approach combines evaluation of the assessment results, as well as online workshops with SMEs to refine the obtained information, align the suggested set of actions with needs of the companies and prioritize them. As result of this procedure, participating SMEs receive an advanced sustainability action plan (ASAP), which helps them to prioritize available measures to implement on their individual sustainability pathway. The ASAP has been implemented for 41 companies within an online community hub system designed to match and join technology and service providers with manufacturing SMEs. "Processes and Production system" was identified as the most important action field for 41% of SMEs, highlighting the need for efficiency improvement in production processes.