How to compare companies on relevant dimensions of sustainability

"Dozens of frameworks of sustainability assessment that focus on the performance of companies have been suggested by now. They propose using numerous sustainability indicators, which are generally measured in very different units. While it is important to assess sustainability with several indicators, it may sometimes be difficult to make comparisons among companies based on a large number of performance measurements. This paper presents a model for designing a composite sustainable development index that depicts performance of companies along all the three dimensions of sustainability—economic, environmental, and societal. In the first part of the paper, the procedure of calculating the index that would enable comparisons of companies in specific sector regarding sustainability performance is presented. However, the emphasis of the paper is on the second part, where the effectiveness of the proposed model is illustrated with a case study in which two companies from specific sector are compared regarding their sustainability performance."