SMEs and the Sustainability Challenge: Digital Shadow Enabling Smart Decision Making

In this chapter, we discuss the challenges SMEs are facing when working with sustainability. Two main issues are addressed. Firstly, making proper sustainability decisions requires expertise rarely possessed by SMEs. As presented in the chapter, there are many assessment tools available, but these are difficult to use for non-experts and often based on inconsequent value choices. Therefore, it is recommended that companies instead partly focus on knowing the physical flows of material and energy related to company activities, and partly seek understanding of how these interact with the surrounding systems. Secondly, sustainability is often assessed in the design phase only, often based on incomplete and overall global sustainability evaluations. This is partly because companies often lack information on important indirect impact elements, as well as specific details about the actual production which mostly is based on manual data-collection. To overcome these two challenges, the chapter presents a vision for a double digital shadow which integrates the production and the sustainability dimensions into one. One element of the digital shadow focuses on the production, applying concepts from Industry 4.0/Smart production, to obtain data about the actual state of the production. A second element focuses on sustainability aspects of the production using novel semi-automated, but often highly aggregated, environmental sustainability data models (e.g., EXIOBASE). In the chapter, the background and state-of-art is expounded, the double digital shadow presented, and important work on, and practical steps to, the integration of production and sustainability is outlined.