Technology has helped, yes, but new social and environmental needs have emerged and impacted performance in the business sector.

Performance indicators are management tools that use indexes, targets, and tolerance ranges to measure the activity of a corporation and support the decision-making of its leaders. With them it is possible to correct management problems, encourage teams, optimize processes, produce with superior quality, and consequently increase profitability.

Through performance indicators, it is possible to know if the goals were reached, if the use of resources was effective, and what failures occurred. Some important indicators are

1) Strategic performance indicators: to check the company's progress in relation to its strategic objectives, those essential to define the next steps of the business, such as billing and productivity.

2) Process performance indicators: aim to measure the progress of a process, focusing on how each task is performed. They measure the capacity to produce or to sell, in how much time.

3) Competitiveness indicators: aim to measure the company's data in relation to its competitors in the market. Prices, delivery times, number of employees, adoption of new technologies, production capacity, distribution and marketing are other factors that, compared to the competition, can indicate how competitive a company is.

4) Quality indicators: These include effectiveness, efficiency and effectiveness indicators. Their main objectives are to identify critical points and indicate how they can impact the quality of the product or service produced and guide decision making that ensures the desired goals are reached. They verify the relationship between a company's deliveries and the resources used to make them happen. Through this group of indicators, it is possible to combat the waste of resources and inputs, reducing production costs without, however, compromising the quality of what is being delivered.

5) Impact indicators: they measure the utility and the impacts generated by the products or services produced and delivered, that is, whether or not that project benefited the company, the community, the client, whatever the target audience is.

6) Profitability and profitability indicators: they analyze how much return the company generates with its efforts.

7) Value indicators: they measure the relationship between the perceived value of a product or service and what was actually spent to acquire it. These are the indicators that verify if what was paid for a product or service is aligned with the benefit it provides. If it is "worth what it costs".

With climate change and the growing concern of consumers with the origin of products, it is also necessary to implement sustainability indicators. They diagnose and evaluate the degree of sustainability in waste management, focusing on the social, environmental, and economic dimensions. Thus assisting in the definition of objectives and targets for continuous improvement.

We have listed suggestions for new sustainability indicators to be implemented within the company:

  • Existence of health risk situations in activities linked to waste management, to monitor the safety of workers who carry out waste management.
  • Existence of a waste management plan.
  • Existence of channels for employee participation in the waste management decision-making process, which helps verify the implementation of the reverse logistics system.
  • Existence of selective collection.
  • Establishing partnerships for the destination of residues, which can be reused in another sector or business.
  • Existence of channels to disseminate information related to waste management, such as sustainability reports.
  • Waste management accounting to verify that the cost of waste management is within the organization's budget.
  • Reduction in the generation of residues, in the consumption of water, energy, and other inputs.

Once the performance indicators are defined and implemented, the follow-up must be periodic. This allows a vision of their behavior over time.