Enabling Systematic Decoupling in Manufacturing Companies: A Materials Criticality Assessment Approach

Manufacturing companies are facing growing challenges in raw materials management. Regulatory requirements regarding supply chains and environmental protection, export restrictions, and bans on the use of certain materials are creating uncertainty and require a high degree of forecasting and responsiveness. In this context, the strategic decoupling of a company’s business growth from its consumption of critical raw materials is becoming increasingly important. A prerequisite for initiating such a systematic decoupling process—particularly in companies with high raw material diversity— is the identification of those materials that are classified as critical in the specific corporate context and therefore require prioritized attention. Criticality assessment models for processed raw materials address this need. However, the existing literature lacks practical, company-specific approaches for determining raw material criticality. The aim of this paper is to systematically analyze existing company-specific approaches for assessing raw material criticality and to identify corresponding research gaps on the basis of a systematic literature review. Subsequently, a new criticality assessment model is developed that follows three guiding principles: minimizing data barriers, differentiating between short-term and long-term criticality, and explicitly integrating corporate objectives into the selection and weighting of criticality indicators. Finally, the exemplary application of the model in a corporate context is discussed.