Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to review the indicators for the three aspects (environment, economy and society) of sustainability (the triple-bottom line (TBL) perspective) for manufacturing sectors. In addition, this paper aimed to: document the sustainability indicators for manufacturing sectors; perform an analysis of these indicators to show their evolutional progress and maturity in terms of their consistent, repeated and standardized usage; and highlight the further work needed to make them mature and more standardized. Design/methodology/approach: The following keywords were used to explore and find the relevant articles: sustainable manufacturing evaluation, sustainability indicators, life cycle assessment, tools for sustainability assessment, and economic and social evaluation in industries. To find articles within this sample, the major focus remained on the terms “indicators,” “metrics,” and “performance measures.” This paper systematically reviewed the studies and analyzed the different sustainability indicators from the TBL viewpoint. Following this, the documented indicators were critically discussed along with their evolutional progress and maturity level. Findings: The results showed that solid waste was the least used and immature aspect in the environmental category, whereas the more frequently used and developed indicators were related to material used, energy used and air emissions. Economic assessment was most of the time limited to cost-based indicators. From a social viewpoint, most of the reviewed studies were based on workers and local community and society related indicators rather than consumers-based indicators. From a sectoral viewpoint, comparatively, studies for metal manufacturing industries were more focused on all three dimensions of sustainability. On an overall basis, of the 144 discussed indicators, almost 34 percent (49) were used just once. Comparatively, the usage of indicators was more mature in manufacturing activities of developed countries than developing ones. Moreover, the usage of indicators was more common at the product level than at the other levels. Originality/value: Unlike previous sustainability indicator sets which were generally long lists of proposed indicators rather than applicable and measurable ones, this paper reported the indicator sets based on studies for manufacturing sectors. Moreover, in contrast to previous reviews on indicators which were mostly based on the environmental dimension, this paper included all three dimensions of sustainability in one comprehensive review while focusing on recent studies published from 2007 to 2017. This paper has explored the recent evolutional progress and maturity of sustainability indicators, and provided insights into their development in manufacturing sectors.

Due to increase in the public and stakeholders’ awareness regarding economic, environmental, and social issues, the construction industry tends to follow the sustainability policies and practices in supply chain management. Hence, one of the most crucial aspects for a construction company in this regard is sustainable supplier selection, and, to this end, an accurate and reliable model is required. In this paper a hybrid fuzzy best-worst method and fuzzy inference system model is developed for sustainable supplier selection. In the first phase of this study, after determining 19 criteria in three main aspects, the final weight of each aspect and criterion is obtained using fuzzy best-worst method approach. In the second phase, the most sustainable supplier is selected by running the weighted fuzzy inference system both in aspect and criterion level, providing more accurate results compared to the use of other available models. Finally, two different tests are employed to validate the results and evaluate the robustness of the proposed model. The novel developed model enables the decision-maker to simulate the decision-making process, reduce the calculations loads, consider a large number of criteria in decision making, and resolve the inherited uncertainties in experts’ responses.

This paper presents a review on Knowledge Management (KM) performance measurement in the past two decades. Various tools and techniques that have been developed are discussed and presented chronologically to show how KM performance measurement has changed during this period. Each tool and technique is evaluated and classified based on the types of measures and approaches used. This paper also proposes six new categories: traditional, advanced, deterministic, stochastic, general result oriented, and specific result oriented, to complement the previous classification schemes. Future research directions for KM performance measurement are identified and presented in a holistic framework to act as a guideline for new researchers who wish to embark on this field.