RESEARCH

AIM OF THE PROJECT

UNIFORM is to contribute to the field by developing a unified sustainability impact assessment (SIA) methodology for measuring sustainability in SMEs’ supply chain practices and will also provide a means for SMEs to effectively monitor their environmental and CSR performance.

The project aims to address these challenges by

a) proposing a sustainability performance measurement tool to measure how sustainable is the supply chain practices of SMEs from the economic, operational, environmental and social perspective and

b) create a model predicting the change of sustainability levels of SMEs taking into consideration various firm/sector-level or country-level characteristics.

The project focuses on one of the most important environmental problems since that SMEs make up a significant proportion of businesses worldwide and thus combined have a large impact on the environment, especially SMEs from manufacturing and process sectors. We expect to produce top scientific publications in both methodology and applications related to the proposed research.

A key objective of the research will be to test [UNIFORM] in diverse settings, i.e. SMEs in different geographical and business environments. The spatial nature of the collected data–anticipated to differentiate results for reasons such as socio-economic and/or political - shall be fully considered by implementing novel methods.

WEB-TOOL FOR MEASURING AND INCREASING SUSTAINABILITY OF SMES

The project’s aim is to develop [UNIFORM], a tool for increasing sustainability levels of SMEs by suggesting specific improvements. In doing this, a freely interactive tool on a website - hosted at Aston University – will utilize the project results of model selection and sensitivity analysis.
The website with the interactive tool of [UNIFORM] will be utilized by both individual SMEs and policymakers.