Sustainability has become a key element for manufacturing competitiveness, combining strategic challenges and business opportunities. Despite an increasing interest on sustainability principles, their deployment in manufacturing contexts is often challenging and ineffective, especially when SMEs are concerned.

Reasons for these are to be found in the complexity of the related topics and in the knowledge distance between sector-specific areas of expertise and sustainability. Also, existing sustainability-centered decision support tools and methodologies require such a high level of specialization and dedicated resources inhibiting their widespread use on a day-to-day basis, which would be essential for a systematic performance improvement of products and processes.

Research activities carried out in the SPS-Lab result in innovative methodologies and platforms aimed at making sustainability a commodity, accessible for all industrial entities and embedded in their every-day decision making processes. This is currently done supporting manufacturing companies and supply-chains in the sustainability-driven transformation process, from performance assessment against validated maturity models, through advisory services for the selection of fitting strategies, technologies and circular products, up to project deployment and monitoring of the results.