Indicators for Sustainability Assessment in the Procurement of Civil Engineering Services

The challenge for the development of a sustainability assessment for management purposes is that many boundary conditions are to be considered (Koplin, Nachhaltigkeit im Beschaffungsmanagement. Ein Konzept zur Integration von Umwelt- und Sozialstandards. Dissertation. Universitat Oldenburg, Oldenburg. Wirtschaftswissenschaften, 2006; Wilkens, Multikriterielle Analyse zur Nachhaltigkeitsbewertung von Energiesystemen. Von der Theorie zur Praktischen Anwendung. Dissertation. Technische Universitat Berlin, Berlin. Fakultat III- Prozesswissenschaften, checked on 2/14/2017, 2012). Even if national and supra-national regulations are fulfilled the needs of the local management are additionally influencing indicators in decision-making. In this work the bottom-up approach of superjacent indicators was applied to the specific procurement requirements in the urban water management of the public water system in Berlin. The indicators from the Agenda 2030 complemented with sectoral frameworks formed an indicator pool, which was later used to build a Multi-indicator system (MIS) in an iterative process. The resulting MIS was tested on case examples using value benefit analysis, Dashboard of Sustainability and partial order for a Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). The value benefit analysis and the Dashboard of Sustainability showed applicability for the support of the decision-making in the procurement process: The partial order method could not compare the variants but displayed an option to critical evaluate the MIS itself. For next implementation phases both indicators and MCDA should undergo a critical review. With a higher number of variants partial order might yield different result due to a better ratio between objects and attributes. To statistically secure the analysis of the MIS the amount of data needs to be increased.