A DEMATEL-enhanced Balanced Scorecard procedure for sustainability-aware performance management in manufacturing enterprises

Introduction Performance management is increasingly important for manufacturing enterprises facing pressures related to competitiveness, responsiveness, sustainability expectations, and long-term strategic alignment. However, many performance management systems continue to overemphasize financial outcomes and treat critical success factors (CSFs) as largely independent, limiting their usefulness for prioritization and strategy execution. Methods This study proposes a strategy-oriented and case-grounded procedure that combines a sustainability-aware Balanced Scorecard (BSC) structure with DEMATEL to make interdependencies among CSFs explicit and translate them into an operational performance management logic. Applied to a Saudi Arabian manufacturing enterprise, the procedure links four stages: literature-based identification of CSFs, organization-specific managerial validation, DEMATEL-based causal mapping, and pilot KPI-level operationalization. Results and discussion Results reveal a customer-driven architecture in which customer-related CSFs function as dominant upstream factors influencing learning and growth and internal process capabilities, which in turn shape downstream financial outcomes. The pilot scorecard demonstrates the feasibility of translating the causal map into measurable indicators for selected perspectives, but it does not constitute full validation of the five-dimensional framework. A key empirical finding is that environmental CSFs were weakly embedded in the observed causal structure, suggesting that sustainability objectives remain peripheral to the organization's current performance logic. Accordingly, the study contributes not by presenting a novel DEMATEL-BSC combination or a fully sustainability-integrated architecture, but by offering a structured procedure for uncovering context-specific causal architectures and diagnosing gaps between sustainability-aware framework design and actual strategic embeddedness.