Abstract

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a performance management tool that analyzes the relationship between tangible and intangible assets. Its ability to render business strategy visible has earned it the distinction of being a strategic management model. Sustainability has become an important part of daily and business life today. With the increasing importance given by stakeholders to environmental and social issues, companies find it necessary to evaluate sustainability activities in their performance evaluations. In order to meet this need, the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) emerged with the addition of a sustainability perspective or parameters to BSC. The number of academic studies pertaining to the application of BSC, which numerous companies and subjects to research have utilized, is inadequate. Due to its hierarchical structure and the necessity to evaluate numerous criteria, BSC is suitable for using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. In this paper, an integrated approach consisting of SBSC, the Picture Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (PF-AHP), and the Objective Matrix (OMAX) method is proposed for the performance measurement of companies. The PF-AHP method has been reorganized for ease of application in determining the perspectives, strategic objectives, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) weights within SBSC. Additionally, the OMAX method has been employed for calculating the performance scores. This proposed approach was implemented in a factory operating in the glass industry. The SBSC created for the company includes five perspectives, 16 strategic objectives, and 34 KPIs. PF-AHP method was used to determine the weights of perspectives, strategic objectives, and KPIs to be used in the performance score calculation with OMAX. The weight of financial perspective is 0.267, the weight of the customer perspective is 0.247, the weight of the internal process perspective is 0.191, the weight of the learning and development perspective is 0.161, and the weight of the sustainability perspective is 0.134. The evaluations made by the decision-makers indicate that the company’s performance measurement still adheres to the traditional framework. The performance score of the company is 6.14 out of 10.

Introduction

The concept of sustainability, which includes economic, social, and environmental perspectives, has become an important issue in today’s world in order to cope with global challenges such as increasing poverty and climate change. This situation has brought pressure from stakeholders on terms of sustainability. At this point, the concept of corporate sustainability has emerged. Corporate sustainability is defined as meeting the needs of its direct and indirect stakeholders without compromising its ability to meet their future needs, taking into account both the administrative and operational activities of the organization (Nicoletti Junior et al., 2018). In addition, corporate sustainability also stands out as systematic management efforts for companies to voluntarily integrate environmental and social issues into management (Hansen and Schalteggar, 2016).

National and international legislation on sustainability perspectives is being developed (Kaplan and Norton, 2004), but reporting of social and environmental activities is still voluntary for companies (Huang et al., 2014). However, the importance given to the concept of sustainability will create a difference among competitors (Nicoletti Junior et al., 2018).

For a company to be successful in terms of corporate sustainability, it is not enough to be successful in a single perspective of sustainability. Corporate sustainability aims for companies to make progress in all three perspectives of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social) (Eifert and Julmi, 2022). Companies adopt environmental management systems practices to achieve the goals they set in order to meet the social and environmental expectations of stakeholders. However, these applied environmental management systems cannot fully reveal the contribution of sustainability performance to economic performance (Tsalis et al., 2013). As technological developments towards sustainability are increasing, companies need an effective tool to achieve their sustainability goals (Al-Mawali, 2023).

Conclusion

In order to succeed in their competitive environment, companies should embrace strategic management and measure the effectiveness of their management systems. The BSC has emerged as a performance measurement method to assess this success. The traditional BSC consists of four perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. With the growing importance of the concept of sustainability, which defines the measurement of environmental and social performance, the sustainability perspective has been added as the fifth perspective to the BSC, giving rise to the concept of SBSC. Since its introduction to the literature, the BSC has maintained its popularity and applied in numerous companies and investigated in various research studies. The multi-criteria nature of the BSC has led researchers to integrate it with MCDM.

In this paper, the modified PF-AHP method was used to weight the criteria in the SBSC. Additionally, the SBSC was combined with the OMAX method to express the performance numerically. Firstly, a team was selected within the company to create the SBSC, and strategic objectives, KPIs and indicators were identified through references from the literature and the company’s knowledge base. Existing data was collected for calculating the performance score, and based on this data, targets were established. The weights for SBSC perspectives, objectives, and KPIs were calculated using the PF-AHP method with the input of opinions from five DMs. The obtained weight values were then utilized in the OMAX method to determine the company’s performance score.