Leveraging Active and Static Sustainability Data for Managerial Decisions

This paper presents a qualitative case study on the role and application of sustainability data in the manufacturing industry. It explores how companies identify and utilise sustainability data, discussing its contents and definitions from various perspectives across the value chain. The study highlights the importance of sustainability data for managerial decision-making and describes the results of interviews with 11 company executives from 10 manufacturing and logistics-related firms. The paper categorises sustainability data into active and static types, emphasising their roles in enhancing sustainability performance and compliance. Characterised by its dynamism, active data facilitates improvements in sustainability practices and innovations, while static data is primarily used for monitoring and reporting purposes. The study’s results indicate that static and active categorisation is valuable for structuring companies’ sustainability data. The potential of active data is unnoticed by many companies’ management since several companies still prioritise regulatory reporting (static sustainability data) based on the interviews. The paper concludes by presenting a funnel diagram that categorises sustainability data at different levels, from industry to raw material, citing examples at each level, and discussing the evolving landscape of sustainability data.