Development of a European Sustainability Reporting Standards Compliant Sustainability Assessment Framework for Manufacturing Organisations Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

Manufacturing organisations face increasing pressure to assess and report their sustainability performance, particularly with the introduction of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). This paper presents a novel sustainability assessment framework that integrates ESRS guidelines with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to provide a comprehensive evaluation methodology for manufacturing organisations. The framework addresses the limitations of existing approaches by systematically incorporating standardised sustainability indicators while enabling precise weighting of their relative importance. Through a structured approach, the framework evaluates environmental, social, and governance dimensions using both measurable and non-measurable indicators derived from ESRS guidelines. The methodology includes automated pairwise comparisons and weight calculations, significantly reducing the complexity traditionally associated with multi-criteria decision-making methods. The framework’s effectiveness is demonstrated through its implementation in a manufacturing organisation, where it successfully evaluated 38 sustainability indicators across 10 ESRS-defined subtopics. The case study highlighted areas requiring immediate attention, particularly in water and marine resources management, where performance fell below the established benchmark. This research contributes to both theory and practice by offering manufacturing organisations a structured approach to sustainability assessment that combines regulatory compliance with effective performance evaluation. The framework’s automated nature and integration of standardised reporting requirements make it particularly valuable for organisations transitioning to mandatory sustainability reporting under ESRS guidelines.