Page 121 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

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meaningful terms, or are they obscured by numerical manip-
ulation and scientific jargon? Will they withstand the test of
changing market conditions over an extended time period?
Because of these complexities, selection of an appropriate mea-
surement framework and specific performance indicators has become
an important strategic decision. Product development metrics need
to be consistent with overall enterprise sustainability metrics. Once
these choices are made and performance goals are announced, a com-
pany must live with them for years to come.

Enterprise Performance Frameworks
Most U.S. companies have moved beyond strictly financial measures
and adopted more diverse performance metrics. For example, the
Balanced Scorecard framework is widely used for balancing finan-
cial indicators with nonfinancial or intangible value indicators [1].
This framework defines four major performance quadrants: Finan-
cial Performance, Operational Excellence, Customer/Stakeholder
Relationships, and Learning and Growth. There are important envi-
ronmental indicators associated with each of these quadrants; for
example, a company might define the following indicators:
1. Financial—life-cycle cost per unit of product, including
emission costs or credits
2. Operational—process eco-efficiency in terms of material
and energy use
3. Relationships—community and stakeholder perceptions
of responsibility
4. Learning and growth—alignment and training toward the
sustainability vision
Less well-known is the Eco-Compass framework, which pro-
vides a visual method for overlaying and comparing the multi-
dimensional performance of alternative products or other entities [2].
It uses a circular array of performance indicators corresponding to
different compass points, and indicator values can be shown as poly-
gons of different colors (see Figure 7.2). This approach, similar to a
“radar chart,” can be adapted to virtually any collection of sustain-
ability or other types of indicators.
With this type of multidimensional framework, integrating the
different aspects of performance becomes more challenging. Leading
corporations have learned some key lessons about performance mea-
surement and achieving continuous improvement:
• The important dimensions of performance, financial or other-
wise, need to be understood and characterized in terms of
quantifiable metrics.